I am a social anthropologist who investigates anthropological and social theory from its margins by paying attention to the experience of peasants and other groups of poor people in India. I employ anthropology’s traditional emphasis on a deep understanding of a place or people as a vantage point from which to critique and expand received ideas in a social theory. I have been conducting a rigorous ethnographic research in the Himalayan borderlands since 1994 where I have combined cultural and sociological analyses of institutions and social life to respond to questions raised by postcolonial theory. I am interested in the themes of cultural politics of development and the postcolonial state in the inclusive policy