Landscapes of Reform: Cultivating Heart and Soil in South India, is the title of the dissertation of Anand Pandian, a graduate student in Anthropology. In eighteen months of ethnographic and archival research in Tamil Nadu, India, Pandian applied ”cultivation” as a useful metaphor for improvement of nature that address both techniques on the land and techniques of the self. He argues that when the colonial Madras Presidency took material interventions in the rural landscape as a potent means of improving the conduct of an area once notorious for blackmail and highway robbery, their actions intersected in complex ways with the native elaboration of the ”virtuous ploughman” as the bedrock of Tamil culture and civilization. Thus Pandian’s study juxtaposes practices of agrarian modernism with Tamil ethical traditions and contributes to an ongoing conversation concerning nature, modernity, and postcoloniality in South Asia.