Amaravati and the New Andhra

Article Amaravati and the New Andhra: Reterritorialization of a Region Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) 1–26 © 2017 SAge Publications India Private Limited SAge Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0973174117712324 http://sad.sagepub.com Carol Upadhya1 Abstract The article explores the cultural politics of regionalism in Coastal Andhra following the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh through a focus on the planning of a new capital city, Amaravati. The envisioned city embodies an imagination of the state’s future development, in which older signifiers of Andhra identity are sutured with global aspirations. Viewing Amaravati as a symbolic space where Andhra is being reconstituted, the article traces the reterritorialization of the region by a deterritorialized provincial elite through return flows of capital and state-led revitalization of regional identity. While the Amaravati plan reflects broader trends of neoliberal urbanization in India, it is also deeply embedded in regional development aspirations and contestations. Keywords Regional identity, neoliberal urbanization, urban planning, Andhra Pradesh, Amaravati On 22 October 2015, an elaborate foundation stone ritual was performed at Uddandarayunipalem village in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh (AP), on an expanse of agricultural land converted into a temporary fairground.1 This wellattended ceremony was organized by the state government to inaugurate the construction of ‘Amaravati’, the planned capital city. On a large stage decorated with a backdrop depicting a Singapore-like skyline, troupes of artistes performed traditional Telugu dances and songs, while politicians from the ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) gave emotive speeches about the promising future of the state. The foundation stone was installed by India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, together 1 School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore, India. Corresponding author: Carol Upadhya, School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore 560012, India. e-mail: [email protected] 2 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) with the AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, as a contingent of Hindu pundits (priests) chanted slokas and performed Vedic rituals. An exhibition created for the occasion featured a scale model of the planned city, along with displays of artefacts illustrating the history and culture of the Andhra region. Through this lavish political performance, the state government sought to engender popular support for its ambitious plan to construct a brand new city to serve as the capital of AP, by interweaving images of the urban future with potent symbols of regional identity.2 The need to build a new capital was an outcome of the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh on 2 June 2014, which left Hyderabad (the capital of the undivided state) within the territory of the newly formed state of Telangana. Under the terms of the bifurcation, Hyderabad is to remain the capital of both states for 10 years, but the new government of residual Andhra Pradesh (which has retained the name) immediately began planning a new capital. Since taking office in May 2014, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has avidly pursued his ‘dream city’ project, investing substantial state resources in the Amaravati plan. The Master Plan, designed by Singapore-based consultants Surbana Jurong, incorporates the latest in modern urban design: visualizations of the future city feature high-rise towers, expansive green spaces and modern transportation systems hugging the banks of the Krishna River.3 Justifying the decision to build a new city rather than designating an existing town as the capital, and the use of international consultants and architects, Chandrababu Naidu stated: ‘After all, I am building a capital city for grandsons and daughters of AP who would like to work in a global environment.’4 In this article, I explore the imagination of development that is embodied in the Amaravati project, which amalgamates a ‘global’ urban model with a recuperated regional identity. I examine the strategies through which the Coastal Andhra region is being positioned as the cultural and political core of thresidual AP state.5 To unravel the political and symbolic significance of Amaravati as an icon of ‘Navya Andhra Pradesh’ (new Andhra Pradesh), I situate the project within the cultural politics and political economy of the Andhra region. In the wake of state bifurcation, the identity of the truncated state is being reconstituted by invoking the regional identity of Coastal Andhra, which was fashioned in the late colonial period not only around cultural and linguistic markers but also a particular vision of progress. The desire of political leaders and many ordinary people alike to transform a ‘backward’ rural landscape into a ‘world-class city’ becomes comprehensible in relation to this older regional narrative of technology-led development, as well as the more recent formation of trans-regional circuits of accumulation and desire. The imagined future of the residual state reflects, in particular, the development aspirations of the region’s political and economic elite, to be materialized through inflows of global capital and expertise. I argue that Amaravati thus represents a process of ‘reterritorialization’ by the regional business class and the educated middle classes (both comprised mainly of Kammas, the region’s major landowning caste), which have become spatially dispersed across India and abroad and yet remain rooted in the Andhra region. The article traces the re-combination of pre-existing elements of Andhra’s regional Upadhya 3 identity—territory, caste and provincial capital—with ‘global’ aspirations and trans-regional circulations of capital and people. A close examination of the Amaravati project reveals the textures and dynamics of this regional reconfiguration, as diverse mobilities and connections coalesce at different scales. The article is structured as follows: In the first section, I situate the Amaravati project within recent literature on neoliberal urban planning and regional development politics in India. The second section traces the formation of modern Coastal Andhra as a distinct region and discusses the popular narrative of Andhra’s history as one of technology-driven development. In the third section I discuss the patterns of mobility that have redefined the region, leading to the spatial dispersion of provincial capital and the formation of trans-regional circuits of accumulation as well as the more recent counter-movement of reterritorialization. Section four describes the Amaravati plan in more detail, highlighting its central role in the ruling party’s development agenda and the variable responses by different caste–class groups to this vision of the future. Finally, I explore the symbolic and political strategies of regional revitalization that are being pursued by the state machinery and political leaders to propagate their vision of the new state’s future. Neoliberal Urban Utopians The plan for the new capital of Andhra Pradesh clearly draws on internationally circulating policy prescriptions and planning models, reflecting processes of ‘neoliberal urbanization’ that have reshaped cities across the Global South (see, e.g., Bunnell, 2015; Ghertner, 2014; Goldman, 2011; Roy & Ong, 2011; Shatkin, 2014). One facet of this trend has been ‘state rescaling’ (Brenner, 2004), as subnational political units forge direct connections with international capital and multilateral agencies (bypassing the national state) in pursuit of their own development objectives. While several scholars have pointed to the respatialization of the state as well as capital in post-liberalization India (Ferguson & Gupta, 2002; Kennedy, 2014; Parthasarathy, 2013), relatively less attention has been paid to the reconstitution of regions (below the level of federal states) by economic and governance reforms. In addition, India has laid out ambitious plans to build a series of ‘greenfield cities’ in rural areas under the national ‘Smart Cities’ programme (Datta, 2015; Kennedy & Sood, 2016), with as yet uncharted consequences for the provincial areas targeted for such planned urbanization. While the Amaravati plan reflects these wider trends, in this article I suggest that it cannot be understood simply as an example of spatial restructuring driven by global capital or ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003), as other mega-projects in India have been framed (Levien, 2013). Amaravati is indeed being produced as a space for global capital investment, but I argue that it is the (trans)regional political elite and provincial capital (who also currently control the state machinery) who are the main agents and beneficiaries of this transformation. The Amaravati project also needs to be located within the cultural politics of Andhra following state bifurcation, as well as larger processes of 4 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) reterritorialization aimed at reclaiming the region as a key site of accumulation (as I explain later). Amaravati is being promoted as the first ‘fully planned’ city to be built in South Asia since the early first after Independence, when new cities such as Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar and Islamabad (Hull, 2012; Kalia, 1998, 2006) were designed to usher in urban modernity and orderly economic development (Holston, 1989; Scott, 1998). Like these earlier postcolonial cities, Amaravati is a state project aimed at fostering economic growth, social modernization and accelerated rural-to-urban transition. But as the recent literature on ‘spectacular urbanization’ (Mohammad & Sidaway, 2012) suggests, the construction of grand capital cities may equally be aimed at fashioning or strengthening national identities (Adams, 2010; Koch, 2013). In this case, the idea of building a hyper-modern city on a ‘greenfield’ site can be seen as a strategy to consolidate a sub-national or regional identity (cf. Sud, 2014). Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal (2003), in their discussion of ‘regional modernities’, examine the mutual entanglements of development dreams and state planning agendas on a regional scale. They argue that the ‘region’ is not just a geographic space or an imagined homeland, but is also a site where both modernity and locality are produced. That regions have become key loci of development aspirations is evident in the periodic eruption of regional autonomy movements across India (Koskimaki, 2011; Mawdsley, 2002). As discussed by Koskimaki and Upadhya in the Introduction to this issue, the region is defined by spatial, linguistic or cultural markers, rooted in historical narratives, materialized through practices of place-making or territorialization, and also reconfigured by contemporary political agendas. The material and symbolic production of regional imaginations is also contested, particularly through a cultural politics of belonging, language ideology or conflicts around development, leading in many cases to the redrawing of political boundaries. By mapping the circulation of development aspirations and their connections with earlier regional identities, we can better understand the crystallization and mutation of regional formations at particular points in time. But we must also attend to the ways in which space and place are produced, reproduced or altered through the movement of people, capital, ideologies and social imaginaries. As critics of older theories of globalization have pointed out, increased mobility does not simply lead to social disembedding or the disintegration of boundaries but may also reconfigure territories or produce new regional formations (Paasi & Metzger, 2017). In this article, I draw on the concepts of spatialization and territorialization to explore urban planning practices and development narratives in relation to regionmaking. The terms deterritorialization and reterritorialization, originally developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1983 [1972]) to refer to the freeing of labour power by the enclosure of common lands in England, or more broadly to the disembedding of social and economic relations, have been used differently by other scholars. In his seminal work on globalization, Appadurai (1990, 1997) adopted the term deterritorialization to theorize the increasing disjunctures between place, people, culture and identity in the context of enhanced transnational mobility and the increasing mediatization and commodification of social life. He also pointed out Upadhya 5 that deterritorialization often evokes aspirations for ‘reterritorialization’, for example, as diasporic groups create new imagined ‘homelands’. In contrast to anthropologists, Marxist geographers have used these terms to describe changing modes of capital accumulation under globalization, drawing on the work of Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1982). As Brenner notes, capital has been ‘continually territorialised, deterritorialised and reterritorialised’, especially through state institutions which provide (according to Lefebvre) a ‘stabilised geographical scaffolding for the circulation of labour-power, commodities and capital on multiple scales’ (1999, p. 434). Brenner argues that reterritorialization—the ‘reconfiguration and re-scaling of forms of territorial organisation such as cities and states’— is intrinsic to globalization (1999, p. 432). In the case of Amaravati, both the anthropological and geographical senses of these terms are appropriate: I argue that reterritorialization is being accomplished through the rescaling of the state, the reconfiguration of territory, as well as the incorporation of the region into global circuits of capital. I also draw on Janaki Nair’s (2005) analysis of the reterritorialization of Bangalore by diverse linguistic and caste groups through the symbolic reclaiming of urban space, as they push back against attempts by the state and corporate capital to transform the city into a deterritorialized space open for global capital investment. Thus, in this article I use ‘reterritorialization’ to refer to the political, material, symbolic and cultural reappropriation of the region by spatially dispersed actors, in particular, the deterritorialized elite and provincial capital. In what follows, I argue that the reconstitution of AP state following bifurcation, and the particular shape that its envisioned capital city is taking, must be contextualized within the distinctive political economy and history of the Andhra region and a particular globalizing development imaginary that moves through trans-regional networks—in addition to broader processes of neoliberal urbanization and state rescaling that operate across the country. I suggest that the hypermodern images of the future city that have circulated widely in the region do not simply reflect the imposition of hegemonic urban planning models, but also represent the logical culmination of an older development imaginary that has shaped Andhra’s regional identity. I also map the diverse elements and strategies that have gone into the refashioning of Andhra regional identity by focusing on the symbolic and material practices of this statist urban development project. Andhra’s Regional Modernity The state of Andhra Pradesh was created in 1956 by joining Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema with the Telugu-speaking districts of erstwhile Hyderabad princely state. Although these regions have never been official administrative units, they have retained separate identities in popular imagination.6 The ‘passions of the tongue’ (Ramaswamy, 1997) that drove the movement for a separate Teluguspeaking state had partially submerged these regional identities, but ultimately language ideology was not sufficient to bind them together: autonomy movements erupted periodically from the 1960s, not only in Telangana but also in the 6 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) other regions (Srinivas, 2008, p. 89). There is no space here to detail the complex inter-regional conflicts that mark the history of linguistic state formation and disintegration in this case, but to provide some background for understanding the cultural politics of the ‘new Andhra’, in this section I briefly trace the crystallization of the ‘Costa’ (the popular term for Coastal Andhra) region. The emergence of Andhra-desa as a distinct region defined by language, culture and territory has its roots in intellectual and social movements of the late colonial period, which centred on language reform and cultural revival. Local intellectuals began to recover and translate classical literary texts and write historical accounts of the region and its culture, literature and language. They also worked to modernize Telugu and craft new pedagogies and communication technologies in the vernacular (Mitchell, 2009). These developments laid the groundwork for the emergence of linguistic nationalism, a movement that was closely intertwined with a desire for progress. Mantena (2013) suggests that language reform was viewed as a means of rescuing Andhra from its ‘backwardness’ by creating a political community that would work for social improvement. In Andhra, ‘the region became the locus for new aspirations of cultural pride’ (Mantena, 2014, p. 342) as well as a ‘site for political modernity’ (2014, p. 343), as claims to the territory and its resources were made ‘in the language of development and modernization’ (2014, p. 340). Significantly, these social and political movements flourished particularly in the coastal districts of Guntur, Krishna and East and West Godavari—marking out the ‘Costa’ region as the cultural and political centre of the newly crafted Andhra-desa. The construction of Andhra as a linguistic region culminated in the movement for a separate state, spearheaded by political leaders of the Telugu-speaking districts of Madras Presidency. Regional leaders claimed that educational opportunities and bureaucratic posts had been monopolized by Tamil speakers and that consequently government investments were flowing mainly to Tamil-speaking areas. In this context, there was ‘much public discussion on the sources of what was referred to as the “backwardness” of the Andhras or Telugus’ (Mitchell, 2009, p. 26). Thus, Andhra regional identity was fashioned not only through the identification of a linguistic community with a particular territory and a new language of political rights (Mantena, 2014), but also around contestations over access to development resources and state power.7 Coastal Andhra’s identity was also shaped by a distinctive regional political economy that crystallized during the same period, especially in the irrigated rice belt of the river deltas. The construction of dams on the Krishna and Godavari rivers in the late nineteenth century fed an extensive canal irrigation system, creating a prosperous regional economy centred on agriculture, trade and moneylending. Wealthy farmers belonging to the major landowning castes (especially Kammas, Rajus and Kapus) began to invest agricultural profits in business activities such as trade and finance, leading to the formation of a new regional business class (Upadhya, 1988), or what Parthasarathy (2015) terms ‘provincial capital’. The circulation of capital between the agrarian economy and growing provincial towns, such as Vijayawada and Guntur, created a well-integrated regional while (Baker, 1976, p. 133). From the 1960s, this regional business class, retaining its Upadhya 7 interests in land, began to diversify into other commercial and industrial ventures within the region and beyond, such as agro-industries, finance, construction contracting, transport and especially the Telugu film industry (Ananth, 2007; Srinivas, 2013). As they accumulated resources and vied for political power and influence, the regional elite also began to pursue modern education for their children, many of whom moved into urban occupations. Consequently, a major section of the emerging provincial middle classes came from rural backgrounds and the dominant landowning communities (Upadhya, 1997b). The popular history of modern Andhra, recounted in school textbooks and by local intellectuals, echoes this story of technology-led development, starting with the British engineer Sir Arthur Cotton who designed the barrages on the Krishna and Godavari rivers—a technological achievement that underwrote the region’s agricultural and economic transformation. The cultural significance of this narrative is indicated by the iconization of Cotton (as well as the postIndependence Indian engineer K. L. Rao, who led the construction of the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam), whose statues can be seen in villages across the region. Popular accounts of Coastal Andhra’s modern history also highlight the region’s relatively high levels of social development in terms of literacy and education, and the ‘enterprising’ character of its people—especially Kammas, who often explain their success and wealth in terms of their purported risk-taking and hard-working nature. Andhra’s regional identity was further strengthened by the political consolidation of the dominant landowning castes, especially through the Non-Brahmin movement (Baker, 1976; Keiko, 2008; Washbrook, 1973, 1976). During the final decades of British rule, provincial leaders from these groups supported the demand for a separate Telugu province, an aspiration that was finally achieved following the fast-unto-death of Potti Sriramulu on 15 December 1952. Andhra state was created by carving out the Telugu-speaking districts from Madras Presidency, but the government denied the demand that Madras city (now Chennai) should be made the capital of the new province. Subsequently, the Telugu-speaking districts of Hyderabad princely state (now Telangana) were added to the state, which was renamed Andhra Pradesh.8 However, the political project of uniting all Telugu-speaking areas required the suppression of regional differences—a project that ultimately failed, as the success of the Telangana movement demonstrates. These political developments point to the crafting of a ‘regional modernity’ in Coastal Andhra, as a rediscovered cultural history and regional/linguistic identity tied to a modern notion of territory intersected with democratic aspirations to create the popular demand for regional autonomy. Coastal Andhra’s modern identity was also shaped by the particularities of the region’s political economy and its historical development, which underwrote the popular narrative of stateled economic progress. At the same time, the region came to be identified with a particular caste group, the Kammas, who owned a large proportion of the land, controlled much of the business in the region, and later became a major political force in the state (Damodaran, 2008; Keiko, 2010).9 Consequently, Andhra regional identity has been centred on the Kamma-dominated core delta districts, 8 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) which in turn explains the strong demand to build the new capital in the Guntur– Vijayawada region (discussed in detail later).10 This regional identity frames how the future of the ‘new Andhra’ is being crafted and imagined, as well as the high level of popular participation in this imagination. But the cultural politics of regionalism must also be situated in relation to recent patterns of mobility, which created pathways for the trans-regional circulation of capital and social imaginaries.11 Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization With the formation of united Andhra Pradesh, with Hyderabad as its capital, the regional elite of Coastal Andhra—provincial capital and the urban middle classes, both hailing mainly from the landowning castes—became highly mobile while remaining closely connected with the region. Farmers, businessmen and educated professionals began to migrate to other parts of the state and beyond, in search of new lands, education, business opportunities and jobs (Benbabaali, 2013). The flow of Andhra capital and people into Hyderabad, along with the shifting of the Telugu film industry from Chennai to Hyderabad, substantially altered the cultural and political fabric of the city (Srinivas, 2013). The growing dominance of Coastal Andhra people in business and formal sector employment in Hyderabad (Kamat, Mir, & Mathew, 2004) was a key factor behind the movement for a separate Telangana. The political and economic ascendance of Andhra provincial capital culminated in the 1983 victory of the TDP, led by the popular film star N. T. Rama Rao (‘NTR’, a Kamma from Krishna district), who upset the long-standing political dominance of Reddys in the state through the Congress Party. The incorporation of Hyderabad into networks of capital and caste emanating from Coastal Andhra was further strengthened when Chandrababu Naidu (also a Kamma, and the son-in-law of NTR) became Chief Minister of undivided AP between 1995 and 2004. Chandrababu Naidu was known as the ‘poster boy’ of India’s liberalization programme: he initiated far-reaching economic and governance reforms (supported by a World Bank loan, the first to be given directly to a state government in India), and made it easier for foreign companies to invest in the state (Mooij, 2007). Chandrababu Naidu is also credited with turning Hyderabad into a ‘global city’. By investing in urban infrastructure and inviting major IT companies to set up operations in the city, he turned Hyderabad into a major destination for software services outsourcing in India.12 Under Naidu’s leadership, the TDP became an ‘aggressive and sophisticated political player in the game of globalization’ (Sunder Rajan, 2006, p. 85). His neoliberal agenda found substantial support from the Andhra business class as well as the expanding ‘new middle class’ in the state (Mooij, 2007, pp. 46–47), comprised largely of educated professionals from Coastal Andhra. ‘Costa’ people particularly benefited from the opportunities that were opened up by the state government’s business-friendly policies and infrastructure investments in Hyderabad, making the city a key site of accumulation for both provincial and international capital. Upadhya 9 In a parallel development, the marked pattern of outward mobility from Coastal Andhra extended beyond India’s borders: from the 1960s educated professionals (especially doctors, scientists and engineers) began to move abroad, giving rise to an affluent Telugu diaspora located mainly in the USA. The political economy and cultural politics of Coastal Andhra have been deeply marked by the transnationalization of the regional elite, the urban middle classes and the dominant landowning communities. Most Andhra ‘Non-Resident Indians’ (NRIs)13 retain close social ties with their home region, creating dense transnational networks based on class, caste and kinship (Roohi, 2016). These networks in turn serve as circuits of social reproduction and capital accumulation, as evidenced in the substantial volume of NRI money that has been invested in land and real estate in the region (Upadhya, 2016b). Following bifurcation and the announcement of the Amaravati plan, these diasporic investments have intensified: significant NRI money has flowed into the new capital region and surrounding areas. The close inter-connections between Coastal Andhra and Hyderabad, and the imbrication of the region within larger transnational circuits of accumulation, have generated new development imaginaries in the state. For instance, the figure of the successful US-based software engineer has shaped youth aspirations across social classes (Upadhya, 2016a), while the desire to build a ‘world-class’ capital modelled on Singapore or Dubai suggests that a particular notion of urban modernity has taken hold, at least among affluent and middle class actors.14 These trans-regional and transnational linkages have also shaped regionalist movements: as Maringanti notes, the Telangana struggle was not just a ‘local’ development but emerged from complex ‘translocal processes, and economic and social contingencies which originated as much in the US and Europe as in coastal Andhra and in Telangana’ (2010, p. 36). The continuing imbrication of the dispersed regional elite in their home region, especially through land ownership and caste affiliations, has influenced how the future of the state is being crafted. For several decades after the formation of united AP, Andhra provincial capital had invested mainly in Hyderabad and other Indian cities, while Coastal Andhra remained largely an agrarian and ‘provincial’ place. Although they retained strong affective, social and economic ties with their home towns or villages, the region was not attractive to the mobile business class as a site of investment, or to NRIs as a destination for return migration.15 But with the division of the state and the plan to build a modern capital city, we see the beginnings of a reverse flow of people, resources and provincial capital into the region. The history of regional development described in the previous section, and the more recent pattern of mobility of Costa people and capital discussed here, provides the background to the Telangana movement and the counter-assertion in ‘Seemandhra’ (a term that combines the names of the other two regions of the erstwhile state, Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema). This inter-regional conflict played out on two main fronts—cultural and economic.16 As the site of key social and political movements from the early twentieth century, Coastal Andhra had come to be regarded as the cultural centre of AP. For instance, the coastal dialect of Telugu became institutionalized within pedagogy and literature while other 10 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) regional dialects were provincialized and devalued. The cultural hegemony of Coastal Andhra created a regional hierarchy that galvanized the Telangana movement (Mitchell, 2009, pp. 43–44; Srinivas, 2015). Indeed, the film industry, dominated by Costa capital and people, was instrumental in promoting the coastal dialect as ‘standard’ Telugu: in films rural Coastal Andhra was often represented as the site of authentic Telugu culture (Srinivas, 2008, 2013).17 But an older plank of the autonomy movement revolved around regional disparities in development and the alleged exploitation of Telangana and its resources by the coastal region. Movement leaders argued that Telangana had been neglected and kept underdeveloped within united AP, while Coastal Andhra had moved ahead by grabbing a larger share of state developmental funds (although in fact most of the ‘development’ in the state occurred in and around Hyderabad). The movement also built on popular resentment against the perceived monopolization of employment, educational and business opportunities in Hyderabad by Costa people. Although the Andhra business class was well established in Hyderabad, their future was thrown into doubt by the Telangana agitation, whose leaders threatened to divest them of their properties and industries. With the impending division of the state, wealthy Costa businessmen began to look elsewhere for investment opportunities. Large amounts of money began flowing into coastal towns, pushing up land prices, while property values in Hyderabad stagnated— signalling the recirculation of provincial capital back into the Andhra region. The proposed division of the state, and especially the imminent ‘loss’ of Hyderabad, engendered angry protests across ‘Seemandhra’, which were widely covered in the news media. As the Telangana agitation intensified, opposition to bifurcation crystallized into the Samaikyandhra (United Andhra) movement. Opponents claimed that it was Coastal Andhra people who had ‘developed’ Hyderabad, and that therefore the city belonged as much to them as to Telangana—turning the political rhetoric of the Telangana movement back on itself. The fact that the division of the state would leave residual AP without a major metropolitan city was a key concern. Even two years after bifurcation, the division of the state continued to be perceived by many people in the coastal region as a major injustice inflicted on them by the proponents of a separate Telangana and the central government (which had accepted the demand).18 In public discussions and personal interviews, many people articulated a sense of ‘hurt’ and ‘humiliation’, which was further fuelled by resentment against the targeting of ‘Costa’ people by Telangana activists. These sentiments, further fanned by political rhetoric, in turn engendered or reanimated a counter-narrative of regional pride that asserts the superiority of the region, its people and its developmental achievements. But, somewhat ironically, the claim that Andhra historically was more ‘advanced’ was inverted by the united AP movement, and the demand that the residual state should be given ‘special category status’ was underwritten by a claim to relative ‘backwardness’.19 Protests against the division of the state continued in Coastal Andhra and elsewhere right up to the last moment, but provincial capital and the regional diaspora had already begun strengthening their links with their home region as the Telangana movement gained momentum. Many Costa businessmen, real Upadhya 11 estate developers and politicians, now located mainly in Hyderabad, believed that bifurcation was inevitable and began buying up parcels of land in strategic locations—especially in places that were rumoured to be possible sites of the new capital. However, for this deterritorialized regional elite, Coastal Andhra was not just another site of accumulation—it has also been reclaimed as their cultural homeland and, importantly, the new centre of political power. Consequently, provincial capital and the regional diaspora now have a deep interest in ‘developing’ residual AP into a vibrant, fast-growing state—an ambition that is encapsulated in the Amaravati project. In discussions about the future of ‘new Andhra’, expressions of resentment and humiliation quickly turned into a more positive narrative of regional pride revolving around the inherent capabilities and determination of Costa people. Local citizens and leaders began to proclaim that ‘we don’t need Hyderabad’ and that they would ‘show Telangana’ by building a better state and a grander capital. Spurred on by constant messages emanating from the state machinery about its plans to build a ‘world-class’ city, local business leaders and citizens, TDP politicians and NRIs alike began to talk about coming together to make Andhra the most ‘vibrant’ and ‘forward’ state in the country. These narratives often highlight the ‘entrepreneurial drive’ and ‘courage’ of Coastal Andhra people who, having transformed Hyderabad into a prosperous ‘global city’, will now perform the same feat in residual AP. These claims echo Chandrababu Naidu’s frequent assertion that he ‘built up Hyderabad as the software capital of the country, and placed it on the world map. I am going to repeat the feat with the new capital of AP.’20 This background partly explains the victory of the TDP in the May 2014 elections. The party’s return to power in residual AP was somewhat unexpected, but given the regionalist counter-assertion and the interest of provincial capital in reinvesting in the region, it is not altogether surprising. Chandrababu Naidu is viewed as a pro-business leader and a man who can ‘get things done’. Not surprisingly, his election campaign was heavily funded by Andhra business groups,21 and many Andhra NRIs also actively raised funds and campaigned for the TDP.22 Middle class citizens as well as large farmers often express confidence in Chandrababu Naidu’s leadership and his plans for the capital, pointing to the way Chandrababu Naidu ‘transformed’ Hyderabad to justify their faith in his ability to execute his plans. Thus, the Amaravati project, as a globally visible symbol of a reborn Andhra state, has channelized mounting expectations about the possibilities for development in the region. Building a World-class Future Even before bifurcation was completed, an intense debate about the location of the new capital erupted, especially in the core delta districts of Coastal Andhra. The central government appointed an expert committee, headed by the respected urban development expert K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, to examine the question. As the committee travelled through the districts of residual AP, local politicians, businessmen and prominent citizens began to lobby for their towns 12 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) to be selected as the new capital. Ad hoc associations sprang up to organize around the issue, and citizens flocked to meetings to chalk out strategies to influence the government’s decision. Important regional towns such as Guntur, Vijayawada, Ongole and Visakhapatnam vied for the honour of becoming the capital, mainly to capture the benefits of the ‘development’ that it would bring. At a meeting of the ‘Rajadhani Sadhana Samithi’ that I attended in Guntur on 28 February 2014, participants articulated their demand that the capital should be located in the Vijayawada–Guntur region (commonly considered the ‘Andhra heartland’). Former Member of Parliament and farmers’ leader Dr Y. Sivaji, a resident of Guntur, told the gathering: ‘This is a once in a life time opportunity to develop the coastal region. I urge all people, cutting across parties, to participate in the all-round development of the region.’23 In September 2014, the state government finally announced its decision to build a ‘greenfield’ city on 200 sq. km. of land in Guntur district, just across the Krishna River from Vijayawada. Although it is the second largest city in the residual state with a population of over 1 million, Vijayawada remains essentially a provincial town—a centre of trade, services and education serving the rural hinterland rather than an important industrial or financial centre. But because of its central location within the residual state, the ruling party decided to build the capital in this area, sandwiched between Vijayawada and another major regional town, Guntur.24 The following month the government revealed the exact boundaries of the planned city, which will engulf 29 existing villages, and announced a ‘land pooling’ scheme to acquire 34,000 acres of agricultural land.25 This location satisfied the demands of the local business class as well as the powerful Kamma community, which owns much of the land in the region. Significantly, the selected area is also a stronghold of the ruling TDP, widely regarded as a ‘Kamma party’. However, the choice of the capital site ignored the recommendations of the Sivaramakrishnan Committee, which had listed several reasons why the Guntur– Vijayawada region is unsuitable (Sivaramakrishnan Committee, 2014). When the committee presented their report to the Chief Minister, just one day prior to his announcement that the capital would be built in Guntur district, Chandrababu Naidu reportedly told the members that the capital ‘must reflect our Telugu culture and ethos, who we are as people, what we wish to become and the path we choose’.26 This statement suggests a collapsing of Telugu identity and the new Andhra state into the Guntur–Krishna region—popularly regarded as the centre of Kamma territory. Chandrababu Naidu has been widely criticized for this choice— he has been accused of catering to the real estate lobby or favouring supporters who own land in the area, and critics have also questioned why the government needs such a large amount of land to build the capital (Ramachandraiah, 2015, 2016). Yet, the plan gained widespread support, especially within the business community and the middle classes, as indicated by interviews carried out in the region and an examination of English language news media and Andhra-focused websites. Although the decision reflected the interests of the ruling party, the landowning classes and other groups aligned with the TDP, it also points to a cultural Upadhya 13 politics of regional assertion centred on Coastal Andhra, which emerged in response to the Telangana movement. Amaravati has been planned to be much more than an administrative capital— it has become the cornerstone of Chandrababu Naidu’s plan for the development of the entire state.27 In his public speeches he has repeatedly proclaimed that he will make AP the ‘number one’ state in India by 2029, with Amaravati as the primary ‘engine of growth’.28 To achieve this goal, the city must have ‘worldclass infrastructure’ and incorporate the latest urban planning models and governance technologies—hence the involvement of Singapore and other foreign consultants in creating the Master Plan and the design of the ‘Seed Capital’. Since taking office in 2014, Chandrababu Naidu has travelled widely—to Japan, Singapore, Australia, China, Korea, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, UK, USA and the World Economic Forum at Davos—to market AP and Amaravati as prime investment destinations.29 Several foreign governments have signed memoranda of understanding with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to ‘help’ build the new capital, primarily through public–private projects. Although concrete deals have not yet materialized, this interest suggests that the planned urbanization of such provincial spaces is seen by international capital as providing a potentially lucrative investment opportunity. The Amaravati example also illustrates how such visions, by equating development with particular urban forms, may ‘become inextricably connected to a semiotic politics, whereby leaders aim to depict their locales as paragons of progress’ (Koch & Valiyev, 2015, p. 577). The promotion of ‘state-dominated, elite financial interests’ through the construction of ‘urban utopias’ in several republics of the former Soviet Union is typical of ‘rentier state political economies’ (Koch & Valiyev, 2015, p. 593)—a characterization that also applies to contemporary AP. While the Amaravati project is intended to foster economic growth, it has also become a key symbolic site that condenses popular aspirations for a revitalized AP. The widespread desire for ‘development’ (as envisioned by Chandrababu Naidu and his government) perhaps explains the relative lack of resistance to the land pooling process, which has already disrupted the lives and livelihoods of thousands of households but brought immediate or potential prosperity to those that held even small parcels of land. Responses to the capital plan have of course been mixed, but it has generated a surprising level of public support—including farmers in the capital zone who have given up their land for the project. On 9 December 2014, I visited a prosperous banana farmer, ‘Krishna Rao’,30 who lived in a village that now falls within the capital zone. The exact contours of the new capital had just been revealed, and several of his neighbours had gathered in his house to discuss the project and the land pooling scheme and what they might mean for their futures. When I asked Krishna Rao what he thought of the capital plan, he declared that Chandrababu Naidu has a ‘real vision’ and the ‘ability to implement it’, but he cautioned that ‘we will have to see whether he will succeed’. While I was chatting with the group, a young man entered who was introduced as a software engineer, a native of Vijayawada who now lives in the USA. ‘Srikant’ had just come down from Hyderabad to purchase a piece of land 14 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) in the new capital region. When I asked why he would want to buy land there only to hand it over to the government, he replied: If you have seen the cities in India, most of them are unplanned. There are congested roads, no common area, no parks and so on. Our leader is trying to build a well-planned city here, with wide roads and parks and all. I want to live in such a city. He told me that he was pooling in money with several of his cousins (also NRIs) to buy an acre of land in the capital zone. Srikant had already purchased one acre for himself a month ago, at a cost of 8.5 million rupees, but the price had now gone up to 15 million rupees. I asked him whether it was not a risky investment (since the value of the compensation plots would depend on how the city developed), and he replied: ‘No, I trust in my Chief Minister. The reason I am buying is because I trust in Chandrababu Naidu.’ Thus, Chandrababu Naidu’s development agenda largely reflects the interests and aspirations of the provincial middle classes, rich as well as smaller farmers, the regional business elite, and the diaspora, whose imagination of the ‘good life’ is a product of the region’s identity as the homeland of the entrepreneurial Kamma community and its recent history of transnationalization. Members of these groups tend to equate development with modern technology, large infrastructure and industrial projects, efficient governance and well-ordered ‘global’ spaces. But the vision of the future that is represented by the planned city is not just one of anticipated wealth or progress but also one of a reinvigorated Andhra-desa. Amaravati has become a focal point for this project of regional resuscitation: as a potent political symbol of the new state and its future, it embodies an development imaginary and projects it onto the space of the region. In the next section, I explore in more detail how the Andhra region is being reimagined through the Amaravati project. Re-visioning Andhra By creating two Telugu-speaking states, the division of AP ruptured the linguistic principle of state formation and left the residual state with the problem of (re) creating a regional identity based not only on language. Just as nation-states are ‘imagined communities’ anchored in imagined spaces (Anderson, 1983), new Andhra must repopulate its territory with a reimagined community and fill it with potent cultural symbolism. In state-produced representations of Amaravati, regional identity is articulated by invoking the history and culture of the Telugus and drawing connections between the ancient past and the imagined future, represented by the new capital of Amaravati. The symbolic fashioning of Amaravati draws on several themes that have a deep resonance in Andhra. The name of the city itself was chosen to recall the region’s significance as a key site of Buddhism in India. Announcing this decision, Chandrababu Naidu stated that the name reflects the ‘historical, spiritual and mythological significance’ of Andhra as the seat of the Satavahana dynasty Upadhya 15 (which ruled a large part of India from around 230 be to 220 ce), thereby linking the new city with the ‘ancient capital of the Telugus’ and the current regime with a famous ancient dynasty. This choice was widely appreciated as a positive step to ‘boost the pride and reassert the identity of Telugus’ at a time when the people were ‘smarting at the “humiliating” loss of the prized capital, Hyderabad’, according to one writer.31 The state government’s communications advisor remarked: ‘With the capital being named Amaravathi, we look back at our glorious past and move ahead. Post-bifurcation, this holds out hope for the future and promotion of unity among Andhras….’32 The deployment of (Hindu) religious symbols and practices in political performances is another strategy seemingly aimed at creating popular support for the new capital. From the Vedic rites of the foundation stone and earth-breaking ceremonies to the incorporation of vaastu33 principles in the design of government buildings, religious rituals and emblems are seen in abundance, anchoring the project in the cultural and spiritual territory of Andhra. Moreover, the site of the foundation stone has been converted into a sort of shrine where visitors can participate in the imagined future represented by Amaravati (Figure 1). The site is fenced off and kept under 24-hour police protection, and a tent nearby houses the Amaravati scale model and other displays from the inaugural exhibition. Another telling example of this strategy was the ‘Mana Neeru, Mana Matti, Mana Rajadhani’ (‘Our Water, Our Soil, Our Capital’) programme, in which earth Figure 1. Foundation Stone Site Source: Photo by the author, 8 August 2016. 16 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) (actually putta matti, or anthill soil, considered auspicious) and water were gathered from villages across the state and used in laying the foundation stone. The water and earth was collected by volunteers, transported to local temples where ‘traditional rituals and all-religion prayers’ were performed,34 and then sent to Amaravati in 20,000 copper kalasams (special pots) where it was ‘mixed with waters of holy rivers of the state and country and used in the Sankhusthapana programme’.35 Even more significant was the scattering of this earth over the territory of the new capital by Chandrababu Naidu when he undertook an aerial survey of the arrangements for the foundation ceremony.36 Through this ritual, Chandrababu Naidu seemed to be symbolically reclaiming Andhra territory. Political and cultural strategies to revitalize Andhra’s regional identity also draw on the popular narrative of regional development described earlier. In the official Amaravati song and video that was released for the foundation ceremony,37 the identity of the new state is narrated as a direct progression from ancient times to the most recent technological advances of modernity. The lyrics of the song are simply a recitation of the names of significant places, people and cultural symbols of Andhra, set to a catchy tune. The name of the song, Namo Namo Janani Andhra Pradesh Namaha, incorporates words that are usually used to invoke the gods while performing puja, suggesting religious devotion to the new state (as in the earlier deification of the Telugu language in the figure of the goddess Telugu Talli). In the video, the state’s cultural identity is represented by visuals of important archaeological sites, ancient sages, traditional arts, crafts, food and costume, rural life, local agricultural products and key markers of Andhra territory—rivers, agrarian landscapes and famous temples. Images of important engineers and scientists from Andhra flow by, interspersed with clips from N. T. Rama Rao’s films and invocations of regional heroes like Potti Sriramaulu. References to modern technology and science feature prominently in the film: water flowing from dams and rockets being launched from Sriharikota satellite station. The lyrics and iconography of the song seamlessly stitch together the past and the future, presenting the new Andhra, and its new capital, as the natural culmination of a long march towards progress. These techniques for the symbolic production of the new capital are meant to garner popular support for the ruling party’s development agenda, by creating a powerful utopia that is at once decontextualized and concretely embedded in the territory of Andhra. Like the fantasy city of Hyderabad in the Telugu film Okkadu, Amaravati is framed as a ‘space of aspiration’ precisely because it is ‘delocalized’, stripped of its regional particularities (Srinivas, 2008, p. 97).38 Such strategies of reterritorialization invoke regionally specific cultural markers, yet submerge them within an imagined ‘world-class’ city. The cinematic production of the new capital through media and symbolic practices suggests that Amaravati may be best understood as an ‘urban fantasy’ that produces symbolic, financial and political value through the creation of a spectacle (Ong, 2011; Watson, 2014). Indeed, commentators on social media have dubbed the new capital ‘Bhramaravati’, meaning an ‘illusionary or mythical city’. As if fulfilling this cynical sobriquet, the state government has requested S. S. Rajamouli, director of the immensely popular Telugu film Baahubali, to help design key government buildings to reflect Andhra cultural and architectural traditions.39 Upadhya 17 Although the city at present exists only in the images and maps of the Master Plan, the process of bringing this urban fantasy into being has generated new development aspirations, revitalized the region’s cultural identity and re-embedded the deterritorialized provincial elite within the space of the region. Of course, not everyone in the capital region shares this imagination of the future. In fact, the majority of residents are landless and so do not stand to benefit from the land pooling scheme or the booming real estate market. Agricultural wage labours, tenant farmers and informal sector workers have lost their jobs and livelihoods (which were dependent mainly on agriculture) and face a very uncertain future. Several workers (especially Dalits) we spoke to expressed dismay and anger at being left out of the ‘development’ promised by the Amaravati project, from which they can foresee little benefit. While some educated youth from lower caste or landless households said that the capital might open up more employment opportunities for them, most were pessimistic about their futures. Such interlocutors often made statements such as, ‘Only those who own land are benefitting from the capital.’ A local auto-rickshaw driver put it succinctly: ‘With the coming of Amaravati, the poor are staying poor, while the rich are becoming crorepatis.’ Many non-Kammas also highlighted the caste base of the project, pointing out that it is the powerful and rich ‘Chowdaries’ (Kammas) who own most of the land, dominate the state government and so will profit from the project, while other groups must be content with the small ‘pensions’ given by the state government to compensate for their loss of livelihood (2,500 rupees per month per household). The sharp contrast between the enthusiastic participation by many Kamma farmers in the capital dream, the disaffection, alienation (and sometimes resistance) of marginalized groups, and the uncertainty of educated youth who have been promised a bright future yet find themselves unemployed, underscores the deep embedding of the Amaravati project in existing inequalities of caste and class. Coastal Andhra is not only identified with Kammas, but also continues to be controlled – politically and economically—by this community and the regional business class. Given the close links between the ruling TDP and this powerful caste–class group, it is not surprising that the state has pushed ahead with the capital plan even at the cost of displacing many families, exacerbating existing inequalities and creating discontent. Conclusion This article presents the planned new capital of AP as a symbolic space where the residual state is being reimagined and reconstituted. Amaravati embodies an imagination of the future in which older signifiers of regional identity are effectively sutured to transnational aspirations, reinscribing the region within the space of the global. I situate the desire for development that drives the capital city project within the history of regional development in Coastal Andhra. The earlier fashioning of a regional identity around a language and a narrative of progress, the consolidation of deterritorialized provincial capital and a regional 18 Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) elite that continue to identify strongly with the region, and the intersecting politics of region and caste within the larger state, have led to a convergence between caste, class, political power and region that have shaped contestations around development over several decades. Only by locating the Amaravati project within these earlier processes of region-making can we make sense of the imagination of development that Amaravati encapsulates—one in which an older idea of progress has been refashioned by inter-regional politics as well as transregional and transnational ties. In this article I have also chalked out the material and symbolic strategies through which the reterritorialization of the region is being pursued, as globally circulating urban development models and a refurbished regional identity are amalgamated into a new assemblage. By conjuring the fantasy of Amaravati, state and political actors have recreated a homeland for its deterritorialized citizenry, which will be realized through return flows of mobile provincial and transnational capital—congealing mainly in land and real estate—as well as the solidification of a new vision of regional development. Chandrababu Naidu and Amaravati are the vehicles through which the Andhra business class and the educated middle classes, now scattered across the world, are reclaiming Andhra as an appropriately modern homeland. From this perspective, the desire to build a ‘world-class city’ in this provincial place becomes not only comprehensible but almost inevitable. The Amaravati project should also be understood in relation to wider processes of urban restructuring that have incorporated cities across India into global circuits of accumulation, even as they remain closely linked to their rural hinterlands through ties of caste, capital and kinship. As an embodiment of the ‘new Andhra’ and its desired future, Amaravati is emblematic of this shift in India’s post-liberalization development trajectory, in which state-led infrastructure development and urbanization projects leverage land to attract private capital investments, leading to extensive spatial restructuring and far-reaching social and economic disruptions. This discussion of the politics of development and region raises important questions—which cannot be addressed in this article— about how this model of development and linked regionalist cultural politics are reshaped as they encounter other aspirations and counter-imaginations on the ground. Notes 1. The research on which this article is based began in 2014 as part of the ‘Provincial Globalisation’ collaborative research programme of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, which was supported by WOTRO Science for Global Development, NWO (the Netherlands). Since August 2016, the research has been supported by a grant from the Azim Premji Foundation, Bengaluru. The support of these funding agencies is gratefully acknowledged. I am especially thankful to the Central European University, Budapest, for awarding me a CEU/HESP Research Excellence Fellowship in 2016, which provided me with the time and space to write this article. I thank S. Udaybhanu for his exemplary research assistance and my colleagues in the Provincial Globalisation programme—especially Leah Koskimaki and Sanam Roohi—for their valuable inputs and support. Upadhya 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 19 Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Sussex Asia Centre, University of Sussex; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru; and Central European University, Budapest. I am grateful to audiences at all these venues, and to the anonymous reviewers of this article, the Editor of JSAD and my co-editor of this special issue, Leah Koskimaki, for their critical suggestions. All shortcomings of course remain my own. This article draws on fieldwork carried out intermittently in Vijayawada and the new capital region in Guntur district, AP, between 2014 and 2017. Research included extensive interviews with residents of capital area villages, real estate developers and builders, government officials and other key informants; observations of meetings and events; informal interactions at various venues; and perusal of government and planning documents and English language media reports. See Surbana International Consultants (2015). The preparation of the draft plan was funded by the Government of Singapore. Nara Chandrababu Naidu’s Bouquet of Promises on AP Capital (2015, Feb 12). The Hans India (Hyderabad). Retrieved 6 May 2015, from http://www.thehansindia.com/ posts/index/2015-02-12/Chandrababus-bouquet-of-promises-on-AP-Capital-131078 Coastal Andhra is not an official administrative unit, but it is widely understood as a distinct cultural and geographical region. The term generally includes the districts of Guntur, Krishna and East and West Godavari which encompass the agriculturally productive delta areas of the Krishna and Godavari rivers. The northern districts of Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam are often categorized separately as ‘Northern Coastal Andhra’. After bifurcation AP was left with 13 districts, including the four districts of Rayalaseema (one of the three regions of undivided AP). These three regions were never part of a single political entity until the formation of Andhra Pradesh (Keiko, 2010, p. 58). Most areas within the four districts of southern Coastal Andhra, the main subject of this article, were under direct colonial rule as part of Madras Presidency. Rayalaseema, earlier known as the ‘Ceded Districts’, also came under British control after they were ‘ceded’ by the Nizam of Hyderabad, while the Telangana region continued to be part of Hyderabad princely state until after Indian independence. These divergent political and administrative histories, together with distinctive agro-ecological conditions, caste–class structures and modes of political organization, led to the crystallization of separate regional identities. It is noteworthy that the Andhra movement initially did not demand unification with other Telugu-speaking districts outside Madras Presidency: the struggle was against Tamil domination and for a separate Andhra province with Madras as its capital (Srinivas, 2013, pp. 66–67). Andhra Pradesh was the first state to be created on the principle of language unity, a move that led to the formation of linguistic states across India through the States Reorganisation Act of 1956. The particular ways in which caste organization and class structure intersect in this region is a complex topic that cannot be fully unravelled here. But it is important to point out that caste ties are central to the operations of provincial capital as well as political pursuits—interests that often overlap (Upadhya, 1997a, 1997b, 2016a). The districts of northern Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema hardly figure in the reimagined state—a scenario that is likely to provoke new regionalist movements. The three regions have historically been dominated, politically and economically, by different caste groups or alliances of castes—Reddys (a large caste category that includes a range of endogamous groups) in Rayalaseema, Reddys and Velamas in Telangana, and Kammas and other ‘peasant’ castes in Coastal Andhra. Alliances and 20 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) contestations between these groups have shaped party politics in the state, with Reddys embedding themselves in the Congress Party from the 1950s (along with Brahmins, Dalits and other groups), while Kammas supported a series of opposition parties. These caste alignments have also inflected the politics of regionalism, as state politics was marked by political rivalry between the two major dominant castes, Reddys and Kammas, which also had different regional bases. Thus, in AP there was a close congruence between party politics, inter-caste rivalry and regional identity. See Elliott (1970), Mantena (2014) and Srinivasulu (2002). This development was also underwritten by the establishment of private engineering colleges by Kamma and Reddy entrepreneurs and politicians in Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema (Kamat, Mir, & Mathew, 2004; Upadhya, 2016a). Many engineering graduates from Andhra moved to Hyderabad for computer training courses or higher education in the 1990s, and from there some went abroad to work as software engineers (Xiang, 2007). IT professionals constitute a large segment of the Telugu diaspora in the USA. ‘NRI’ is the official designation for Indian citizens who live outside India for more than half of the year. In Andhra, as elsewhere in India, the term ‘NRI’ is popularly used to refer to anyone settled abroad regardless of their citizenship status. An alternative plan for a ‘Green Capital’ (a more modest and ecologically appropriate city that is also grounded in local architectural and cultural traditions), which was proposed by a group of local farmers and activists, has been generally dismissed as unrealistic or ‘backward’. While a number of Andhra software engineers and other professional migrants have returned to India, most have settled down in large cities such as Hyderabad and Bangalore, which offer the kinds of job opportunities and lifestyle they seek. Srinivas (2015) argues that the Telangana movement, which began as a conflict around disparities in development, later took a ‘cultural turn’ in which the assertion of Telangana identity became more central to generating mass support. Arguably, neither the ‘Samaikyandhra’ movement nor recent attempts to reconstruct Andhra identity have been able to mobilize a similar level of popular enthusiasm. Further research is required to understand to what extent the elite strategies and initiatives described here have been successful in generating mass affect around a refurbished regional identity. Mitchell notes that what became ‘standard’ Telugu in modern AP is the dialect associated with educated members of dominant caste groups of the core coastal districts (2009, p. 24). Srinivas (2013) provides a detailed account of the regional politics of Telugu cinema and the shift of the industry from Madras to Hyderabad. He notes that the ‘conquest’ of the city by the Telugu film industry ‘was so complete that no attempt was made to produce films in Urdu, which was the lingua franca in the Telangana region before 1956’ (Srinivas, 2008, p. 90). In the language politics of state formation as well as regionalist movements in Telangana and Andhra, the existence of large Muslim communities and non-Telugu language groups has barely been acknowledged. These narratives echo the earlier (and still persistent) grievance about the ‘loss’ of Madras when the province of Andhra was created (Mitchell, 2009, p. 90). Interlocutors in the coastal region often pointed out that this is not the first time they have ‘lost’ a capital city, citing this as another reason why they support the Amaravati plan—the capital will be located in the Andhra heartland and so cannot be taken away. During the debate on bifurcation, the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that residual Andhra Pradesh state would be given ‘special category status’ (usually accorded to the most ‘backward’ states to provide extra financial aid and certain economic benefits) for a period of five years to compensate for the loss of revenue Upadhya 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 21 and other resources to Telangana. The current Prime Minister Narendra Modi also promised during the election campaign to grant special status to AP for 10 years, but this has not been done. The demand for ‘special status’ is a major political issue that continues to provoke periodic agitations in the state. Sarma, Ch. R. S., & Somasekhar, M. (2015, April 5). Two millennia later, Amaravathi becomes Andhra capital once again. The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved 16 June 2015, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/twomillennia-later-amaravathibecomes-andhra-capital-once-again/article7070798.ece The close alignment of the TDP with provincial capital is indicated by the fact that several wealthy Andhra businessmen stood for election for the first time in 2014 and, having won, were appointed as ministers or key advisors to the government. A prime example is the education entrepreneur P. Narayana, who became the Minister for Urban Development and has been the key elected official responsible for the development of Amaravati. A successful social media campaign, ‘Bring Back Babu’, was mounted by NRIs. See: https://www.facebook.com/BringBabuBack/ ‘VGTM region the best bet’ (2014, March 1). The Hindu (Guntur). Retrieved 30 September 2016, from http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Vijayawada/vgtmregion-the-best-bet/article5739706.ece The residual state does not have a large metropolitan city comparable to Hyderabad. Visakhapatnam (‘Vizag’), located in northern coastal Andhra, is the largest city. As the site of several major industries and central government establishments, Vizag is the most cosmopolitan and ‘developed’ city in the state, but it was not chosen as the capital due to political and locational reasons. Land pooling is a market-based mechanism that makes private landowners ‘stakeholders’ in real estate or infrastructure projects. In the case of Amaravati, farmers were requested to ‘voluntarily’ hand over their land to the government, in return for which they will receive smaller plots of ‘developed’ urban land within the project zone. In the first phase, the government targeted 34,000 acres of privately owned agricultural land belonging to some 22,000 households in Thullur, Mangalagiri and Tadepalli mandals of Guntur district. The state received ‘consent forms’ from owners of around 32,000 acres, while owners of 2,000 acres refused to part with their land. The announcement of the capital location and the land pooling scheme set off a cycle of speculative investment in land, driving up prices of agricultural land in the area to as much as 80–100 million rupees per acre, yielding windfall profits for those who sold their land. Many farmers sold off part of their land before pooling the rest, and used the returns to purchase land or property in other places, to construct or improve their houses or to start small businesses. Panel on new AP capital submits preliminary report to Chandrababu Naidu (2014, June 14). Live Mint. Retrieved 16 May 2015, from http://www.livemint.com/ Politics/1RGN1K8EYXoxaAdhljyQhM/Panel-on-new-AP-capital-submitspreliminary-report-to-Naidu.html These plans have been laid out in a series of ‘vision’ documents. Retrieved 30 April 2016, from the AP government website: http://apvision.ap.gov.in/about.html Digital currency, literacy future to end corruption: N. Chandrababu Naidu (2016, December 3). Live Mint. Retrieved 20 December 2016, from http://www.livemint. com/Politics/PtYFmizTq3oIVCjmUoB0pK/Digital-currency-literacy-future-to-endcorruption-N-Chan.html The project requires a large infusion of money to pay for infrastructure development and the construction of government buildings. The AP state government, already struggling with a large budget deficit, has appealed to the central government for 22 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. Journal of South Asian Development 12(2) funds and applied to multilateral agencies like the World Bank for loans, besides wooing multinational investors. Pseudonyms are used for all informants. A New Identity for Andhra in Ancient Amaravathi (2015, March 29). The New Indian Express. Retrieved 16 May 2015, from http://www.newindianexpress.com/ thesundaystandard/A-New-Identity-for-Andhra-in-Ancient-Amaravathi/2015/03/29/ article2735312.ece Naming new capital as ‘Amaravathi’ will rekindle unity of Andhras: Observers. (2015, April 5). The Indian Express. Retrieved 16 May 2015, from http://indianexpress.com/ article/india/india-others/naming-new-capital-as-amaravathi-will-rekindle-unity-ofandhras-observers/ Vaastu is a reinvented ancient Indian architectural tradition that has become very popular in Andhra and across India in recent years, and which is often invoked by real estate developers as a marketing strategy. The incorporation of religious symbolism and spiritual practices into popular politics—such as the penchant of Chandrababu Naidu and other political leaders to take advice from astrologers, priests and vaastu experts—is a wider development that demands a separate paper. Other political movements, in particular right-wing Hinduism or hindutva and its various projects of reclaiming ‘sacred’ sites such as Ayodhya, also deploy Hindu symbols and identity. However, the rituals described here are not driven primarily by the same political agenda, which has found relatively little purchase in Andhra. Good response to ‘mana neeru, mana matti’ programme. (2015, October 18). The Hindu. Retrieved 30 September 2016, from http://www.thehindu.com/news/ cities/Visakhapatnam/good-response-to-mana-neeru-mana-matti-programme/ article7776616.ece Amaravati: Anthill soil from 16,000 villages to be collected for AP capital foundation (2015, October 14). Deccan Chronicle. Retrieved 20 November 2016, from http:// www.deccanchronicle.com/151014/nationcurrent-affairs/article/anthill-soil-16000villages-be-collected-ap-capital-foundation Chandrababu Naidu sprinkles water and soil brought from across the state over Amaravati (2015, October 21). Deccan Chronicle. Retrieved 20 November 2016, from http://www.deccanchronicle.com/151021/nationcurrentaffairs/article/chandrababunaidu-sprinkles-water-and-soil-brought-across Amaravathi Geetham Official Video Launch. Retrieved 20 November 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlphlAQgvq4 Srinivas suggests that the region (or the provincial) cannot become such a space because the ‘escape from the “region” is a critical part of the promise of the future’ (2008, p. 97). But in this case, the region has been reconfigured as a space that is at once ‘global’ and ‘provincial’. ‘Baahubali’ director to help design Andhra Pradesh’s new capital (2016, December 18). The Times of India. 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