Politics of Development and Forced Mobility: Gender, Indigeneity, Ecology 3030939006, 9783030939007

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MOBILITY & POLITICS SERIES EDITORS: MARTIN GEIGER NICOLA PIPER · PARVATI RAGHURAM

Politics of Development and Forced Mobility Gender, Indigeneity, Ecology Sutapa Chattopadhyay

Mobility & Politics

Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Nicola Piper, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Editorial Board Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Michael Collyer, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Charles Heller, Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre, Nairobi, Kenya Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland Antoine Pécoud, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Villetaneuse, France Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Roskilde, Denmark Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica Everita Silina, The New School, New York, NY, USA Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Mobility & Politics Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Nicola Piper, Queen Mary University of London, UK Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Global Advisory Board Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, UK Michael Collyer, Sussex University, UK Charles Heller, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brazil Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre, Nairobi, Kenya Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland Antoine Pécoud, Sorbonne University Paris Nord, France Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Denmark Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica Everita Silina, The New School, New York, USA Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, New Zealand William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefits of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just a few of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension between openness and restriction raises important questions about how different types of policy and politics come to life and influence mobility. Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational movements and cosmopolitics. This series is indexed in Scopus.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14800

Sutapa Chattopadhyay

Politics of Development and Forced Mobility Gender, Indigeneity, Ecology

Sutapa Chattopadhyay Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Development Studies St. Francis Xavier University Antigonish, NS, Canada

ISSN 2731-3867 ISSN 2731-3875 (electronic) Mobility & Politics ISBN 978-3-030-93900-7 ISBN 978-3-030-93901-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Modern building window © saulgranda/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Writing this book in English raises the question of whom these accounts will benefit as these writings circulate in academic communities. Historically, the essentialist, Eurocentric, and patriarchal perspectives have been adopted and integrated into scholarly analyses (Silvey, 2004). Accordingly, the language of the dominant perspectives shapes the analytic conceptualization and implementation of cartography and geography (Bayart, 2000). The homogenization or standardization of most social science research to publication in English effectively eliminates nuanced details that can only be obtained from native language expressions. Assimilating minute details of social science research in an often Anglophone language creates information barriers for non-Anglophone readers, generates the risk of concealment of information, and universalizes one language by normalizing its omnipresence and significance. The historic amendment of the English language as the only language of communication— “English Official/English Only” took place in California in November 1986 and was followed by a triumphant monopoly of English scholarship. To a co-edited volume Language Problems of Developing Nations by Fishman, Ferguson, and Dasgupta (1968),1 a colleague of Fishman pointed out that he was indulging in a tautology with a title like that. In another manuscript, Fishman noted that countries like the “USA had 1 Last accessed November 9, 2021. http://languagemanagement.ff.cuni.cz/system/

files/documents/Neustupn%C3%BD%20Language%20Problems_1968.pdf.

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joined the ranks of the ‘developing nations’, or alternatively, the greater realization that no tautology is involved at all. There are many developing nations without language problems (such as El Salvador and Rwanda), as well as many developed ones with language problems (such as Belgium and Spain)” (Fishman, 1966, p. 125). I completed my dissertation at Kent State University in 2006 and now teach at a university in the Atlantic provinces of Canada. As a doctoral student in geography, charged with a passion to analyze the politics of dam making, I was eager to understand the impacts of relocation from the voices of resettled villagers, and thereby explore the social, economic, and cultural lives of Indigenous people in the western part of India where resettlement and rehabilitation followed dam construction. In colonial India, the British clear-felled large swaths of forested lands to acquire cheap raw materials for infrastructure and plantation industries. Indigenous lands were wantonly appropriated for the above reasons, and Indigenous people were forced to work in plantations and take up sedentary farming. Accumulation and appropriation of resources and local peoples continued in tandem. For decades, postcolonial government in India perpetuated the colonial mentality and economic policies for growth and progress, while, in the process, uprooting, dismantling, and disrupting Indigenous lives and livelihoods in the name of greater good and development. In step with this perpetuation of colonialism, environmentalists, social activists, radical writers, nature lovers, and ordinary people have criticized these injustices. Following my book and report-based research on the Narmada valley, but prior to visiting the villages of Gujarat in western India, I was moved by the mental images of the Indigenous communities’ combined reverence for nature and sustainable use of surrounding resources. I also thought that through the process of construction of the Sardar Sarovar project (SSP) (see Fig. 1.1), government actions used fear tactics to control the movements in the valley, brutally uprooted people, economically marginalized them, and disturbed tribal everyday lives. I accepted this understanding that the outsees were powerless, that the state conditioned their everyday lives, and that the action groups worked harmoniously to create better living conditions for the impacted people and to restore ecological sanity in the valley. I learned that my motivational images were not completely false or true, and that the experiences of the oustees were not homogenous throughout the valley. As my

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work progressed, my assumptions crumbled into an untidy medley of contradictions. In hindsight, it seems naïve to think that reading and learning about the degenerative nature of the massive Sardar Sarovar dam from books, journal articles, or newspaper cuttings would be enough! It was an entirely different experience to visit submerging2 and rehabilitated3 villages. The scale of resettlement and relocation was incomprehensible. Further, sitting under a giant mahua tree with the Ratwa chief as he told his story chewing a mouthful of peanuts, or standing on a bridge overlooking places the Narmada River punctured to irrigate farming fields (see Plates 4.4 and 4.5). It was appalling to see Adivasis use tractors, thrashers, winnowers, or other mechanical devices on plots of land as small as five acres. It was painful noticing the gaze of wives, daughters-in-laws and adolescent girls, who wanted to say so much, but stood mutely behind their fathers, mothers-in-laws or spouses. At one rehabilitated village, I observed from a distance a single woman whom the villagers called a Daayan (witch), as she was transformed to complete insanity; I still wish that I had a chance to hear her narrate her story. Through my research, I experienced firsthand the ways in which dams impacted—and continue to impact—these people and their land. Although writing about them could be seen as a mere academic ritual, I attempt to acknowledge my position, far removed from the pain of these people, and give true voice to the struggles, emotions, and sufferings of the dislocated and dispossessed communities of the Narmada River valley. Antigonish, Canada

Sutapa Chattopadhyay

References Bayart, J. (2000). Global subjects: Political critique of globalization. Polity Press. Fishman, J. A. (1966). Language loyalty in the United States: The maintenance and perpetuation of non-English mother tongues by American ethics and religious groups. Mouton. 2 Submerging villages is a term used in the aforementioned sources for villages that were going to be submerged by the rise in the water level due to the dam, the reservoir, and related constructions. 3 Rehabilitated, although, reads awkward as a term used for villages/villagers that were relocated with complete compensation package.

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Silvey R. (2004). Power, difference and mobility: Feminist advances in migration studies. Progress in Human Geography, 28, 490–506.

Acknowledgments

Several years back, Professor Raghuram motivated me to write a book for the Palgrave-Mobility series. Thrilled as I was, I did not know if the book manuscript proposal would be accepted, nor did I know how my tenure writing this book will unfold. When the proposal was approved, I was finalizing another book on migration and squatting with Routledge, which was followed by several relocations from Europe to Canada, multiple temporary teaching contracts, severe precarity, lack of stability, stress, and strains. This book would never have been submitted without the attentive consideration of the Palgrave crew, including, but not limited to Geetha Chockalingam and Anne-Kathrin Birchley-Brun, and others. The extensions of time from Palgrave, my thirteen-yearold daughter’s sacrifice of her time with me, my mother’s constant encouragement, and all the villagers whose lives were sacrificed in the name of industrial development—clarified my duty to complete this intellectually and personally stimulating project. I was reviewing and retelling the stories that I heard many years back, while combining my auto-ethnography, current experiences, situatedness, and identity. During the years since I began writing, I have received support and reassurance from so many people that it is not possible to name them all here. Those who have liberally shared with me the fruits of many years of knowledge and experience include the villagers of the Narmada valley, the resettlement government officers who accompanied me to the remote submerging villages, a wide variety of action group activists, and

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many scholars, students, and researchers who informed me about the Sardar Sarovar project, villages, and the valley. To all of them, I express my sincere gratitude and the unique debt for their time and stories so generously shared. Significantly, my special gratitude goes to those who took the time to read portions of the book, to hear me read excerpts from the manuscript, and to offer comments and criticism based on their own expert knowledge. Although the final responsibility for accuracy and validity of the text is mine, I could not have completed the book without the help of the following friends, family members, and colleagues. My friend and soulmate Shirley Bartz patiently and carefully read every word, argument, and conceptual analysis of the manuscript. Her remarkable endurance correcting, arguing, and suggesting changes make me feel comfortable and confident. My friends Susmita Dhar, Lahshmi Vasudev, and Ashwini Tipnis; my siblings Sudipta Mukherjee, Sangita Mukherjee, and Soumik Chatterjee; my nephews Diptabrato Mukherjee and Neil Mukherjee and niece Sreeja Mukherjee for listening from great distance to parts of the book. This is the most appropriate space to thank Pierpaolo Mudu, Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, James Tyner, Levi Gahman, Judith Watson, Pamela Moss, Silvia Federici, Riley Chisholm, Tanya Basok, Lesley Wood, Johannah Black, Deborah Engel-DiMauro, Louis Awanyo, and Susan Vincent who provided general advice and motivated me through this writing process. I appreciate the tolerance shown to me by my friends and co-editors of another book project Laurence Cox, Anna Szolucha, and Alberto Arribas, who kept the ball rolling while I was finalizing this project. Every story collected from the villagers contributed diverse facts and remarkable details on the profound transformations, anxiety, pains, and challenges they endured. I am indebted to all the research participants from Golagambdi, Kindiucchakalam, Sanoli, and Suryatalav. During the ethnography, invaluable assistance was provided by Govind Bhai Tadvi and Bhavin Trivedi in translating parts of narratives that were a mix of Gujarati and tribal dialects. I am thankful to my aunts and uncle (Minu Bhattacharya, late Bani Bhattacharya, and Bandana Chakravarti) and to my friends (Meera Chatterjee, Marilyn and Dennis Andrew, Marilyn Weller, Susan SverdrupPhillip, Andrew Bartz, Maria Franzoi, Linda Nagle, Nelda Jean, and Marie Swim) for making Canada a second home. My special thanks to

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St. Francis Xavier University colleagues, especially Women’s and Gender Studies and Development Studies colleagues for their endless support. In closing, I could not possibly have completed the task, under circumstances sometimes grim and strenuous, except for the support of my daughter Anika. The weekend phone calls to my parents and family kept me moving. I also extend my gratitude for the silent comfort and affection that flowed from my feline and canine family. I acknowledge all those who contributed to my research who I have failed to mention here.

Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

Contesting Development

15

3

Historical Appropriation of Land and People: In the Adivasi Heartlands of Western India

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4

Everyday Lives of the Tadvis in the Narmada Valley

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5

Negotiating Development: At the Interface of Power and Resistance

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6

Conclusions: Gender, Nature, Development

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Glossary of Adivasi and Hindi Words

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Map of Narmada valley Location map of Vadgam (submerging village, Madhya Pradesh) (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006; Das, 1982) Plan of Houses (Golagambdi rehabilitated village) (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006) Villagers searched for occupation or marriage alliances or preferred to relocate within this radius (Vadgam submerging village, Madhya Pradesh) (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006; Das, 1982) Plan of Golagambdi rehabilitated village (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006)

3 75 81

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List of Plates

Plate 4.1 Plate 4.2

Plate 4.3 Plate 4.4

Plate 4.5 Plate 4.6 Plate 4.7 Plate 4.8 Plate 4.9

Plate 4.10 Plate 4.11

Elderly person making toddy from mahua dooli (flowers) (submerging village, Madhya Pradesh) Houses were primarily made of mud with title roofs or thatched roofs (submerging village in Madhya Pradesh) The picture of the hamlet was taken from a distance (submerging village in Madhya Pradesh) Long/extended pipe leading to the farmlands from the river Narmada (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh) Numerous pipes drawing water from the river for irrigation (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh) Site of worship/temple (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh) Site of worship—temple of Mahavir (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh) Stairs leading to the ghat/banks of the Narmada (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh) Cremation ground in the banks of Narmada. The picture was taken from a distance (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh) Herds of goats (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh) Cultivated land, rehabilitated village, Gujarat

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65 66

67 68 69 70 71

71 72 73

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LIST OF PLATES

Plate 4.12

Plate 4.13 Plate 4.14

Plate 4.15

Plate 4.16 Plate 4.17

Plate 4.18

The picture was taken of this vegetable grown in the gardens on the house plots (rehabilitated village, Gujarat) Common site in rehabilitated villages where machineries were used for cultivation House of the most impoverished person (Type 3 house)—the owner was a single woman and parent of three young children (rehabilitated village, Gujarat) Houses belonging to the people of lower economic and social status (Type 3 house) (rehabilitated village, Gujarat) Type 2 House–belonged to middle income groups (rehabilitated village, Gujarat) Houses of the most wealthy or influential villagers (Type 1 House). They were few in number. From left to right—Govind Bhai Tadvi (Adivasi research assistant), Bhavin Trivedi (research assistant) and the village participant who owned the house (rehabilitated village, Gujarat) Cattle sheds commonly constructed (in rehabilitated villages) to keep the house spaces organized (rehabilitated village, Gujarat)

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Introduction

Abstract Globally, Indigenous communities live within a legacy of environmental dispossession due to large development projects that dismantle their mental and physical well-being and a land-based way of life. Environmental dispossession is historical and contemporary, which has reduced Indigenous people’s access to their traditional environments and rights to generational resources. These processes are maintained by displacement or relocation, industrial waste, environmental contamination, forced assimilation, resource extraction, and brutal appropriation through the statecorporate encroachment which are direct and indirect forms of violence. All over India, the Adivasi population are subject to profound dispossession in the form of resource degradation and community displacement during colonial and post-colonial eras. This chapter details the challenges of Adivasi communities in Western India due to the construction of Sardar Sarovar project. Analyzing Adivasi stories, I understand resistance, nature-culture ties, social transformations, and development politics in the Narmada valley. Keywords Narmada valley · Sardar Sarovar project · Adivasis · Colonialism · Settler Colonialism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4_1

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Large-scale development projects, like the Sardar Sarovar project (SSP), rekindled historic deliberations around claims for protection and assimilation of Indigenous peoples. However, archival research has established testimonies of Indigenous dislocation, in some pockets of India, predating not just recent projects, but also dating back to pre-colonial times. In this manuscript, terms such as Indigenous, tribal, and Adivasi are interchangeably used. However, I prefer using the term Adivasi, while referring to the Indigenous people of India, which means “original settlers”. This term is chosen by the Adivasi people, and I used it, being aware that the concept is not outside of contradictions. The concept Indigenous relates to the societies with ancestral ties to their territories prior to colonial occupation and describes thousands of distinct societies with their own languages, generational knowledge, independent forms of livelihoods, worldviews, territories, and systems of governance. The Indigenous people of the Narmada valley1 ramified a mix of Pavra and Bhilli languages with regional languages of Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati, that differed in dialect from languages typically used by the majority populations. The Adivasis are culturally distinct, socially isolated, geographically segregated due to internal colonialism and contemporary dominations by the ruling congregates and suprastatal institutions (Baviskar, 1995; Shah, 1989; Whitehead, 2003). My study focuses on the involuntarily uprooted Adivasi populations in the Narmada valley (Madhya Pradesh, India) whose lives were destabilized by state resettlement and relocation (R&R) actions. The narratives on reconstruction challenges, in conjunction with extant migrant accounts of power struggles, offer unique insights into the mechanism of involuntary dislocation in the Narmada valley. This book encompasses the stories captured through the voices of the Tadvi, Bhil, Bhilala, and Ratwa linguistic groups within the Adivasi resettlers, and my auto-ethnographies of the valley and its people. There is a close relationship between Adivasi identity, their ways of life, and associations with land which establishes their need to protect their collective rights of self-determination and self-management of land and forestry. Lands on which Indigenous people lived are often rich in resources, which is the primary reason that have been targeted for development, leased, appropriated, plundered, sold, and polluted by the statist-corporate groups. Moreover, any feminist discussion of

1 Refer to Fig. 1.1

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Fig. 1.1 Map of Narmada valley

resilience combines discourses of power, politics, and history while opposing Indigenous exploitation due to their intimate link between lands and bodies (Braidotti, 2011; McIntosh, 1988). In contrast to postcolonial notions, Indigenous people in settler nations are still under direct European settler occupation and rule in every aspect, including constitutional and bureaucratic management, family and child services, and gender-based policies (Baviskar, 2003). Arguably here, settler colonialism has produced settler societies wherever colonial occupation has touched, including places not under direct occupation. Settler colonialism directly informs past and present forms of colonialism, capitalism, and global governance, performing biopower by eliminating Indigenous people through “amalgamation and replacement” in deeply historical and contemporary ways (Burcell, 2004). By the late twentieth century, we see the putative end of colonialization by decolonization of the Global South with the new re-colonization through universalization of Western technologies of rule through neoliberalization and globalization as forms of extractive capitalism (Morgensen, 2011). Compelling evidence on

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the similarities of colonial bureaucracy prevails across the world. Marx ([1867] 1977, 846) argued primitive accumulation as a dual process; first particular people’s property is grabbed (i.e., “annihilation of self-earned property”), and then, these landless people’s labor is appropriated and exploited (i.e., “expropriation of the laborer”). Whitehead (2003) draws parallels to Marx’s eloquent description of the enclosure system in the late eighteenth-century England states to dispossession and accumulation with massive commodification of nature: …a multitude of small farmers, who maintained themselves and families by the produce of the ground they occupy and by the animals kept on a common … and who therefore had little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence, were converted into a body of men who earned their subsistence by working for others… (Marx, [1867] 1977, 842)

Further, Said (1979, 41) underscores: “up to 85 percent of the world was colonized by European powers”. In a similar vein, Simpson (2013, 11) writes that under colonial logics, both Indigenous women and Indigenous lands were construed as “rapeable” properties of the settlers. While King writes “The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people”. These discourses echo Foucault’s analysis of the power of the sovereign “to take life or let live” with the governmentality that executes “the power to ‘make’ life or ‘let’ die”. Here, “biopolitics” speaks of the juridical form of power of the sovereign that places the sovereign in a privileged position to decide life or death, constituting power that nurtures life or prohibits life to the point of death (Foucault, 1975). Butler (2009) argues that the exceptional power of the modern state or global regimes, in this case colonial governmentality, replaced Indigenous women’s status with one of “inferiority, hierarchy and the paradigm of women as property” (Sikka, 2009, 7). Bramha and Upadhyay (1979) mentions similar analysis of Warli women in Western India where their labor was extracted, while their self-respect and pride were hurt through direct violence on their bodies. Similarly, Simpson writes: Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are

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seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource […]. Colonialism has always extracted the Indigenous … Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous women, Indigenous peoples. (Simpson, 2013, 11)

The Sardar Sarovar project has displaced 2.5 million Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, producing discontent, and crisis of survival and identity for the adversely affected people or project affected populations (PAPs) (Cernea, 1990). The stakes in the process of dam building largely undermines the agency and autonomy of PAPs through accumulation and appropriation of their lands by curbing their independent means of livelihoods. The PAPs have received attention regarding the SSP, but their histories of exploitation due to colonialism, global capitalism, and neoliberalism have largely gone unnoticed and/or understudied. Conservative estimates show that 60–70% of those displaced by the footprint of the dam were Adivasis, with wealthy Nimaris agriculturalists, from the Nimar (which means plains) making up the remaining 30–40%. The SSP displacees had no realistic choice of their resettlement and were forced to move to the locations selected by the state. Mired with controversies, Narmada valley activist movements spanned two dynamic fields founded on social and ecological impacts of dam construction: a rich intellectual landscape based on resistance, protests, national and global direct action, and Indigenous social transformations. In most cases, migration depends upon the push and pull of factors at places of origin and destination, and migrants are people who choose to move. However, there is increased acknowledgment that not all migrants have a choice over their migration. The people who are displaced by dams or other development projects, like the SSP resettlers, fall into the category of “involuntary” or “forced” migrants as they are dislocated against their will to make way for economic good (Boyle et al., 1998: 199; Gadgil & Guha, 1994; Li & Rees, 2000: 441). Mega projects are state-led cultural dislocations, which are legitimized, popularized, sanctioned, and executed following the ideology of national progress (Escobar, 1995; Escobar & Alvarez, 1992). Throughout the manuscript, I have interchangeably used the terms migrants, resettlers, displaced populations/people, and PAPs for the project affected people of the Narmada valley. Globally, Indigenous communities live within a legacy of environmental dispossession that has dismantled their nature-cultural linkages and a land-based way of life that manage and nurture their social, spiritual,

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and cultural well-being for centuries. These processes are maintained by displacement or relocation, industrial waste and environmental contamination, forced assimilation, and resource extraction and appropriation through the state-corporate encroachment over Indigenous lands. Direct forms of dispossession result in the physical separation of people from land. For instance, all over India, the Adivasi population were subject to profound dispossession in the form of resource degradation and community displacement during colonial and post-colonial eras. Similarly, in Canada, three decades of polychlorinated biphenyl and other chemical release into the St. Lawrence River near the Mohawk community of Akwesasne has contaminated the communities’ subsistence fishery (LaDuke, 1999), impacting the health of lactating women and relations with their nursing babies, as well as the overall health of the community. Indirect forms of environmental dispossession sever the relationship that Indigenous people have with the land through processes of acculturation and assimilation (Bartlett, 2003). For instance, many young and middleaged Adivasi people, motivated by abject poverty and following the attraction of the urban lifestyle, move to cities for waged work, swelling the “impoverished informal proletariat” (Bremen, 2002; Chattopadhyay, 2014, 9). Dislocation negatively affects Indigenous peoples’ strong cultural ties to land and place resulting in broken networks across families and communities. In Canada, the 1876 Indian Act is an example of colonial patriarchy and violence that deeply entrenched in Native women’s social presence and status. Indigenous women were detached from their community, network, land, or property ownership resulting in acute marginalization, deteriorating health outcomes, and economic conditions. Dawn Martin-Hill (2003, 108) writes “… the image of a voiceless woman whom I call She No Speaks, born from the tapestry of our colonial landscape … defeated, hunched over, head down and with no future”. In the same vein, Judith Butler (2009, 14–15) stresses: “without (the ability to grieve), there is no life… instead, ‘there is a life that will never have been lived’, sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost”. Thousands of Indigenous women’s lives are grieved, sorely missed, and remembered by their families; their voices are largely invisible and silent in research on trauma and resilience (de Finney & Saraceno, 2014). Within the international context, research has shown the impacts of stolen generation, residential schools, and sixties scoop survivors who were forcibly removed from their communities and relocated to

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the homes of non-Indigenous families resulting in increased susceptibility to substance abuse, depression, and suicide (Hunt, 2015). The Sardar Sarovar project negatively impacted women’s rights to property, self-governance, and decision-making power necessary to manage their household (Mehta & Srinivasan, 2000). Direct and indirect forms of dispossession commonly result in decreased capacity for women to access land and common property resources, and to exercise local livelihood practices and cultural rituals. Thus, dispossession amounts to attacks on Adivasi women’s health and cultural identities and leads to economic precarity, illiteracy, higher rates of morbidity, and low life expectancy. This phenomenon is global for Indigenous communities, especially women (Alfred, 2008; Battiste & Henderson, 2000; Gracey & King, 2009; King et al., 2009). Other outcomes of dispossession increase the vulnerability of Indigenous peoples to myriad issues, such as barriers to access traditional foods, and loss of language, religion, traditions (Brown et al., 2012), psychological stress, and social and cultural impacts from industrial development (Guha, 1984; Gupta, 1998; Jeffery et al., 2008), and enhanced helplessness due to changing climatic conditions (Furgal & Seguin, 2006; Furgal et al., 2002) among countless others. The status of Indigenous peoples in India is a contested issue that dates back to colonial discourses of aboriginals as “primitive tribes”. At this time, caste embodied racial and cultural difference, while the political order of race and racial ideology was referred to as the “categorization and classification of primitive tribes” (Ghurye, 1963; GOI, 1961a, 1961b; Guha, 2010; NCAER, 1963). In this context, the term primitive refers to the original and ancient forest and hill inhabitants in isolated and impenetrable geographic areas with distinct modes of administration, different from non-Adivasi people in river valleys and plains (Sivaramakrisnan, 1995, Sivaramakrishnan & Agarwal, 2000). One discourse suggests that colonial administrators and Indian ruling elites and comprador classes such as sahukars, zamindars, awaris, bhaniyas, and sarkars constructed the term primitive for a wide variety of isolated communities lived free of any outside influence but got exposed due to colonial expansionist policies and contemporary resource extraction expeditions and revenue collection (Whitehead, 2010). From the mid-twentieth century, the historical exploitation and subordination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous non-affluent communities inherent to construction of projects for economic development in the Global North have been duplicated in the Global South. Even though

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Adivasis comprise only 7% of the total Indian population, 40% of Adivasis are displaced by development projects, and 25% of them are relocated due to dams (Fernandes & Thukral, 1989; Parasuraman, 1996). Likewise, 52% of Adivasis are blighted by severe impoverishment living below the poverty line—with the demarcation of this line questioned for its conservative bias (Nilsen, 2012; World Bank Report, 1994, 2011). Whitehead (2003) mentions that the distinctive modes of production, social and cultural isolation, and geographic location define them as “borderline people”. Guha (2010) argues that Adivasis are people who have “gained the least and lost most from six decades of democracy and development in India”. Debatably they cannot be termed as the “original settlers” drawing from their historic relocations and contemporary forced displacement accounts. In present-day India, the SSP debates are packed with a range of social movements for “ecological justice from below”, “perceived as the authentic legatee of an all-class and genuinely mass-based national upsurge”, which travels back to the country’s past (Gadgil & Guha, 1995, 63–64). Upon independence, the post-colonial Indian state changed its position from a total subordination of the land and people in the dam’s footprint to an expansive development requiring the theft of property belonging to marginalized people, for which the appropriation of nature and its surplus communities as the laboring bodies was instrumental (Chattopadhyay, 2014, Gadgil & Guha, 1995). The severe impoverishment and historical subjugation mark the Adivasis as the “most oppressed” people in India (Chattopadhyay, 2014, 9; Xaxa, 2002). Before colonialism and current post-colonialism, their practices and systems worked in harmony with their surroundings. Evolution of capitalist development, exploitative market relations, wealth production by appropriation, and dispossession with the unchallenged political power have strictly cornered Adivasi communities to economic impoverishment. Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession draws upon Marxist description of accumulation of wealth, while Rosa Luxemburg’s ([1913] 1963) theorization of imperialism as a primary mode of accumulation and the global spread of capitalism in non-capitalist sectors—imposed by the repressive state—is of fundamental importance. Therefore, the debates rest on whether previous forms of accumulation have continued and are refined and complex in post-colonial times. Settler colonialism has conditioned and disciplined Indigenous peoples in occupied lands but refers to all-round political, economic, and cultural processes the colonizing metropoles contacted. “For more than five hundred years, western law

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functioned as biopower in relation to ongoing practices of European settler colonialism”. In this way, settler colonialism has “directly informed the past and present forms of colonialism, global capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance” (Morgensen 2011). Alienation of producers from the means of production for preservation and for expropriation, ostensibly undertaken to the end of development, is brutal (Sundar, 2016), regardless of the provision of any “equivalent livelihood alternatives or adequate compensation for evictees” (Neumann, 2001, 308), or institutional failures to compensate the dispossessed. Today, the Narmada valley projects stand as monuments of the coercive aspects of state power that underlie precisely the institutions of neoliberal democracy offering a sardonic twist to perpetuate human impoverishment. SSP rendered problematic tendencies engrained within extractive capitalism that prolong systematized exploitation of the marginalized population by influential groups. The riveting accounts of dispossession, resistance, and the painstaking experience of resettling in relocated villages document state-led strategies to develop, organize, and legitimize repugnant practices that are brought into play by a powerful few and which wreak havoc upon the uprooted villagers. There is of course a polyphony of voices from those with alternative visions of development—Asish Nandy, Vanadana Shiva, Amita Bhaviskar, Nandini Sundar, Ramachandra Guha, Gail Omvedt, Madhav Gadgil, Gyanandra Pandy, Siva Ramakrishnan, Arturo Escobar, Wolfgang Sachs, Gustavo Esteva— that is intellectually and politically different from liberal development theorizations. Some people from the aforementioned list have criticized development, not to wholly exclude it, but in an effort to create awareness of the vestiges of neocolonial excesses. In this book, I analyze the scholarly works on Indigenous peoples’ struggles for survival. I conceptualize that forced mobility and relocation due to environmentally degenerative mega projects have altered gendered practices and culturally destructive activities, thereby transforming2 the lives of Indigenous peoples in India and around the world (Domosh, 2 Silvia Federici (2004) expanded on feminist scholars of the 1970s and women’s struggles. I develop her work on social transformation to analyze the ontological disassociation of gendered Indigenous people from their lands and rights due to development and dislocation. This detachment alters the nature of work and separates them from their livelihoods, subsistence farming, and resource bases, sometimes leading to a major shift of “social power” and an epistemological erasure of women’s and marginalized Indigenous peoples’ agency (Swyngedouw, 2006, 199).

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1997; Halfacree, 1995; Halfacree & Boyle, 1993). The two overarching objectives of this manuscript are: 1. Colonial and contemporary commodification of nature and construction of large-scale development projects have forced dislocations and systematically marginalized Indigenous peoples, subsequently relegating them to a free laboring class; and 2. The ways in which forced relocations have led to social transformations of Indigenous communities by challenging their autonomy and modes of survival. In order to comprehend the aforementioned objectives: 1. I analyze Indigenous archives on anti-colonial and de-colonial struggles against modernization, commodification, and state forestry initiatives including Indigenous people’s everyday reliance on nature (land, forests, fishing grounds, grazing lands), autonomous lifestyles, political relationships, spirituality, sense of community-horizontalitycollectivity in relationship to capitalism, and corporate/state expansion. Moreover, I draw from wider Indigenous narratives to understand their survival strategies, political ideology, and coping mechanisms vis-à-vis their respective capitalist states. Although the different Indigenous struggles are rooted in diverse historical periods, situated in different geographical locations/contexts, and socio-political conditions, they share their respective histories and situations in global networks. These commonalities can produce new spaces of political solidarity and new modalities of socio-cultural survival. This analysis underscores Indigenous nature-culture linkages and efforts to follow alternative ways of living, tolerating the transformations brought about by techno-development projects and forced dislocation. 2. Similarly, I analyze the narratives of Indigenous evictees from the Narmada valley, in Western India to comprehend their linkages to land and communal holdings, everyday gendered practices, social transformations, and solidarity struggles in rejecting modernization projects.

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Against this background, I argue that forced mobility and colonial modernization/civilizational projects and post-colonial capitalist development are entangled concepts and processes that have influenced each other. In so doing, this has brought about manifold historical and current transformations intensely altering intricacies of their everyday lives to an extent that traditional Indigenous linkages to culture, nature, histories, and rich traditions are fractured.

References Agarwal, A., & Sivaramakrishnan, K. (2000). Introduction: Agrarian environments. In A. Agarwal & K. Sivaramakrishnan (Ed.), Agrarian environments: Resources, representations, and rule in India (pp. 1–22). Duke University Press. Alfred, T. (2008). Colonialism and state dependency. Journal of Aboriginal Health, 5(2), 42–60. Barlett, J. (2003). Involuntary cultural change, stress phenomenon and Aboriginal health status. Canadian Journal of Public Health Revue Can. De Sante Publique, 94(3), 165. Battiste, M., & Henderson, J. (2000). Protecting Indigenous knowledge and heritage: A global challenge. Purich Publishing. Baviskar, A. (1995). In the Belly of the River: Tribal conflicts over development in the Narmada Valley. Oxford University Press. Baviskar, A. (2003). Between violence and desire: Space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi. International Social Science Journal, 175, 89–98. Boyle, P., Halfacree, K., & Robinson, V. (1998). Exploring contemporary migration. Longman. Bradotti, R. (2011). Nomadic subject: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (2nd ed.). Columbia University Press. Brahme, S., & Upadhyaya, A. (1979). A critical analysis of the social formation and peasant resistance in Maharasthra (pp. 238–239). Shankar Bhramho Samaj Vidhyan Granthalaya. Bremen, J. (2002). The laboring poor in India: Patterns of exploitation, subordination, and exclusion. Oxford University Press. Brown, H. J., McPherson, G., Peterson, R., Newman, V., & Cranmer, B (2012). Our land, our language: Connecting dispossession and health equity in an Indigenous context. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, 44(2), 44–63. Burcell, G. (Trans.). (2004). Michael Foucault: Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College de france 1977–1978. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso.

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Cernea, M. (1990). Internal refugee flows and development-induced population displacement. Journal of Refugee Studies, 3(4), 320–339. Chattopadhyay, S. (2014). Postcolonial development state, appropriation of nature, and social transformation of the ousted Adivasis in the Narmada Valley, India. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 25(4), 65–84. de Finney, S., & Saraceno, J. (2014). ‘Playing Indian’ and other settler stories: Disrupting western narratives of Indigenous girlhood. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 29(2), 169–181. Domosh, M. (1997). Geography and gender: The personal and the political. Progress in Human Geography, 21(1), 81–87. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering development. Princeton University Press. Escobar, A., & Alvarez, S. E. (Ed.). (1992). The making of social movements in Latin America: Identity, strategy and democracy. Westview Press. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch. Autonomedia. Fernandes, W., &. Thukral, E. G. (Ed.). (1989). Development, displacement and rehabilitation. Indian Social Institute. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books. Furgal, C., Martin, D., & Gosselin, P. (2002). Climate change and health in Nunavik and Labrador: Lessons from Inuit knowledge. In I. Krupnik & D. Jolly (Eds.), The earth is faster now: Indigenous observations of artic environmental change artic research consortium of the United State (pp. 266–300). Artic Studies Center. Furgal, C., & Seguin, J. (2006). Climate change, health, and community adaptive capacity: Lessons from the Canadian North. Environmental Health Perspectives, 114(12), 1964–1970. Gadgil, M., & Guha, R. (1994). Ecological conflicts and the environmental movement in India. Development and Change, 25(1), 101–136. Gadgil, M., & Guha, R. (1995). Ecology and equity: The use and abuse of nature in contemporary India. Routledge. Ghurye, G. S. (1963). The scheduled tribes, popular prakashan. Government of India (GOI). (1961a). Report of committee on tribal economy. Government of India (GOI). (1961b). Report of Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission, Delhi. Gracey, M., & King, M. (2009). Indigenous health part 1: Determinants and disease patterns. Lancet, 374(9683), 65–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0140-6736(09)60914-4 Guha, R. (1984). Forestry and Indian industry. Economic and Political Weekly, 19(26), 970. Guha, R. (2010, April 14). Adivasis: Unacknowledged victims. Outlook. Gupta, A. (1998). Postcolonial developments: Agriculture in the making of the modern India. Duke University Press.

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Halfacree, K. (1995). Household migration and the structuration of Patriarchy: Evidence from the USA. Progress in Human Geography, 19(2), 159–182. Halfacree, K., & Boyle, P. (1993). The challenge facing migration research: The case for biographical approach. Progress in Human Geography, 17 (3), 333– 348. Hunt, S. (2015). Representing colonial violence: Trafficking, sex work, and the violence of law. Atlantis, 27 (2), 25–39. Jeffrey, A., McFarlane, C., & Vasudevan, A. (2008). Guest editors’ introduction: Debating capital, spectacle, and modernity. Public Culture, 20(3), 531–538. King, M., Smith, A., & Gracey, M. (2009). Indigenous health part 2: The underlying causes of the health gap. Lancet, 374(9683), 76–85. LaDuke, W. (1999). All our relations: Native struggles for land and life. South End. Li, H., & Rees, P. (2000). Population displacement in the Three Gorges reservoir area of the Yangtze River, Central China: Relocation policies and migrant views. International Journal of Population Geography, 6, 439–462. Luxemburg, R. ([1913] 1963). The accumulation of capital. Routledge. Martin-Hill, D. (2003). She no speaks and other colonial constructs of ‘the traditional woman’. In K. Anderson & B. Lawrence (Eds.), Strong woman stories: Native vision and community survival. Sumach Press. Marx, K. ([1867] 1977). Capital (Vol. I). (S. Moore & Edward Aveling, Trans., F. Engels, Ed.). International Publishers. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Excerpt from White Privilege and Male Privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies (Working paper 189). Wellesley Center for Women. Mehta, L., & Srinivasan, B. (2000). Balancing pains and gains: A perspective paper on gender and large dams (Working paper prepared for the World Commission on dams). WCD Secretariat, South Africa. Morgensen, S. L. (2011). The biopolitics of settler colonialism: Right here, right now. Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), 52–76. NCAER (National Council of Agricultural Economic Research). (1963). Socio economic conditions of primitive tribes in Madhya Pradesh. NCAER. Neumann, R. P. (2001). Disciplining peasants in Tanzania: From State violence to self-surveillance in Wildlife conservation. In N. L. Peluso & M. Watts (Eds.), Violent environments (pp. 305–327). Cornell University Press. Nilsen, A. (2012). Adivasi mobilization in contemporary India: Democratizing the local state? Critical Sociology, 39(4), 1–19. Parasuraman, S. (1996, February 17–19). Displacement and rehabilitation: Some points towards a national displacement policy. Paper prepared at the National Workshop on the Rehabilitation Policies, Indian Social Institute. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage Book.

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Shah, G. (1989). Tribal identity and class differences: A case study of the Chaudhuri tribe. In G. Shah (Ed.), Caste conflict and reservation. Ajanta. Sikka, A. (2009). Trafficking of Aboriginal women and girls in Canada (Aboriginal Policy Research Series). Institute on Governance. Simpson, L. (2013). Dancing the world into being: A conversation with idle no more’s Leanne Simpson. https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2013/ 03/06/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-lea nne-simpson Sivaramakrishnan, K. (1995). Colonialism and forestry in India: Imagining the past in present politics. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1), 3–40. Sundar, N. (2016). The burning forest: India’s war on Bastar. Juggernaut. Swyngedouw, E. (2006). Water, money and power. Socialist Register, 43, 195– 212. Whitehead, J. (2003). Space, place and primitive accumulation in the Narmada valley and beyond. Economic and Political Weekly, 37 (40), 1237–1256. Whitehead, J. (2010). John Locke and the Governance of India’s landscape: The category of Wasteland in colonial revenue and forest legislation. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(50), 83–93. World Bank Report. (1994). Resettlement and development: The bank-wide review of projects involving resettlement 1986–1993. The World Bank Environment Department. World Bank Report. (2011). Poverty and social exclusion in India. The World Bank. Xaxa, V. (2002). Protective discrimination, why scheduled castes lag behind scheduled tribes. Economic and Political Weekly, 36(29), 2765–2772.

CHAPTER 2

Contesting Development

Abstract Forced migration or involuntary relocation is seldom caused by environmental changes, wars, famine, and marginalization but by economic development. Although not all projects are beneficial, like Sardar Sarovar, they massively transform migrant lives, roles, practices, and autonomy, increasing their dependence on capital. Moreover, these deteriorated farming conditions have an enormous impact on women— placing the burden of home care and child rearing on them and putting them in economically subordinate positions. Against this background, this chapter initiates the thought that agency and autonomy can revolutionize the concept of feminism. Keywords Environmental change · Forced mobility · Development politics · Feminist indigeneity

Agency of Development? Forced mobility is agonizing! Those who are forced to relocate due to conflicts, wars, famines, natural hazards, death, and starvation, or due to the construction of mines, dams, or other rural or urban infrastructure projects have no choice but to abandon agricultural crops, land, habitat, cattle, cultural grounds, and other spaces they identify as home and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4_2

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habitat. Not all dams are economically profitable or beneficial. The World Commission of Dams (WCD) reports have shown that while the benefits of dams include irrigation, electricity, navigation, control of flood water, their negative socio-ecological effects are immense, impacting inhabitants upstream and downstream of the dam footprint. WCD case studies of 14 large dams had price overruns of 242 percent with 8 projects in India having an average of 262 percent overrun. Other ‘costs’ include involuntary, traumatic, and delayed relocation, as well as the denial of development opportunities for years, an underestimation of numbers of people needing resettlement including those affected by canals, biospheres and related projects, increased disparity due to gender-blind resettlement policies, and so on …. Only 57 percent of dams studied by WCD had internal rates of return of 10 percent or over. (Whitehead, 2003, 4224)

Most of the hydroelectric projects in India are funded by World Bank (WB) with internal rates of return at less than 10%. The list of failed dams continues to grow (Whitehead, 2003). Statist development project planners, or those who execute a project, employ disingenuous and harmful practices upon those impacted by development projects, including dislocation without consultation, transparency on compensation, geographic conditions of the relocated villages, information on future locations, economic hurdles, or acceptance from host villagers. Simultaneously, project affected populations (PAPs) included in the decision-making processes (Ferguson, 1990). Mostly, large development projects dismantle lives of marginalized, gendered, ethnicized, and racialized communities. They are often underprivileged and occupy primary sector work, such as farming, fishing, and collectors of minor forest products. Rightly, Pieterse (1998) argues that development scholarship lacks an emphasis and understanding of Indigenous cultures or local cultures that live psychologically rich modes of life and function close to nature. Development is always about the power and the politics of decision making, about losers and winners, or dilemmas and devastations as well as creation of possibilities. Following these dilemmas in development studies, in the mid-1980s, Booth (1985) articulated the “impasse in development studies” as a phase of new development with the cessation of cold war, the failure of development in the South, and the deliberations on globalization. According to Kothari and Parajuli (1993), development that has its origins in colonial processes and discourses, and within the

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manifestations of the geopolitics of the Third World, is neither banal or innocent nor humane or beneficial. Third World development, that came to the forefront after 1945, is a robust combination of policy, action, and know-how that has altered rapidly with analytical and practical challenges posed by neocolonial-neoliberal influence on countries now referred to as the Global South (Flobre, 1988; Mohanty, 1991; Roberts, 2008). There have been unquestionable improvements in basic needs, access to potable water, improvements in life expectancy, and poverty reduction, but it is foolish to ignore the stark inequities that are staunchly in place. Several people have pointed out many reconfigurations, criticisms, ambiguities, and uncertainties resulting from alternatives of development that have been apparent for decades. This reminds me of Berman’s (1983) details on the legend of Faust a critique of progress and modernity. No wonder the locus of development is a “powerful semantic constellation” but at the same time development is “as feeble as fragile and as incapable of giving substance to thought and behavior” (Esteva, 1992, 8). One of the fundamental arguments of development that does not surface in policy manuals is that development entails profound ecological and social change, which occurs in spaces that emerge from the interplay of the politics of power at local, national, and transnational scales (Blaike & Brookfield, 1987). For instance, Mehta and Srinivasan (2000, also see Mehta, 2007) demonstrate that the last three decades have had serious repercussions on the vegetal cover of the entire Western Indian region (Kutch, Gujarat, and Saurashtra) due to de-vegetation following escalation of commercial logging combined with a lack of institutional restrictions. This has led to a decline in the groundwater table, soil degradation, and deterioration in farmers’ health and economic well-being. During my visit to the Narmada valley in 2003 and 2004, I witnessed Tadvi villagers cutting existing shrubs and bushes for firewood, with almost every open space being used for cash crop or subsistence crop cultivation. De-vegetation and severe drought are the focus of environmentalists and are being experienced firsthand by the villagers in this region and many others around the world (Murishwar & Fernandes, 1988). Tadvi dietary patterns have shifted with changes in environment, landscape, crop availability, and lack of access to lands used in common with other local communities. In short, any of the spaces where projects are constructed and implemented cannot be seen as providing “pre-given sociospatial containers” as this would ignore the massive transformations

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of environmental and social events for uprooted Indigenous communities (Zimmerer, 1996). Due to the absence of a diversity of livelihood mechanisms in relocated villages, most of the displaced villagers whom I visited cultivated cash crops and heavily relied on pesticides, fertilizers, high yielding rain-fed crop varieties, and farm machinery in the hope that intensive mechanized farming would increase crop yields. Moreover, villagers who were inexpert at using modern farming methods or who did not have the capital to invest in farming devices, seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers were falling behind those who were able to obtain higher yielding crop varieties. Those who received infertile and uneven farming lands, through compensation, were severely impacted. Furthermore, abnormal monsoons, pest attacks, and repeated crop failures for various reasons made conditions for some deplorable. Following dislocation, the transformations in gendered norms, activities, and roles have placed women in economically subservient positions. With the loss of their subsistence base, people also lose their property and commons (i.e., access to medicinal herbs, grass or fodder, minor and major forest products, fishing grounds, land, water, seeds, etc.), relegating their bodies to commodities as waged laborers employable for capital or in Marxist terms, surplus communities or a reserve army of laborers. Capitalism breeds and feeds on these laborers, while state supported technological infrastructures, like dams, accumulate wealth. Although controversies and failures of development projects are not cumbersome to write about or narrate in lecture halls, discourse and concepts of development are nurtured by a privileged few. While development as a concept circulates within academia, in policy manuals, government briefs, or newspaper blogs, mechanically and institutionally, actors engage in policy making, management and control of resources and diverse spatiotemporal units for infrastructural change. Sadly, the voices of those at the receiving end of development projects are not always heard, and academic experience or manuscripts cannot accurately document the challenges and losses encountered by development-induced migrants. Outsiders’ records and tales of the dispossessed cannot adequately reflect the anguish of the Adivasis whose free access to vast tracts of wooded hill country shrank to five acres of land provided as compensation after relocation. In relocated villages, the female members of a household often neither self-managed economically nor felt socially autonomous. Their livelihoods, resources, freedom of choice, and voices were appropriated for the benefits of multinationals and large project contractors.

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For example, the villagers of Golagambdi needed a stable income to support successful agricultural crops and household expenses. Villagers who were inexpert in using modern farming methods or did not have the savings to invest in farming were languishing behind those who are able to obtain higher productivity using hybrid crop varieties. Those who received infertile and uneven lands were also adversely impacted. Furthermore, abnormal monsoons, pestilence, and repeated crop failures made conditions for some deplorable. A villager said: We mull over the variety of vegetables and edible leaves we got from the forests in Vadgam. Some food and cash crops are grown in Golagambdi but larger quantities are saved for sale, the major emphasis here is to achieve higher productivity for cash crops (cotton and groundnut). We are now constricted to a very “specific occupational niche”. (Govind Bhai Tadvi, Golagambdi village, male respondent, age 33, July 23, 2004)

During my ethnography, I mutely witnessed the hardship of the dislocated Adivasi of the Narmada valley. Because my research was based on narrative analysis, I am aware that particular kinds of identity stem from the participant stories, which give agency to the storyteller. Moreover, agency is a socio-cultural mediated action (Ahearn, 2001) that illuminates the story tellers’ experiences and challenges, while opening a window into the process of identity construction (Benwell & Stoke, 2006, 138) providing the researcher’s access to further details following the storytellers’ gestures, body movements, facial expressions, or mute body language. Lefebvre (1991) related that people create spaces through their stories, by narrating their everyday spatial practices, actions, and patterns of interactions (Low & Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003). I identifying the contingencies of the dislocated villagers’ agency was crucial as agency embodies the autonomy of the participant. Agency and autonomy are understandably political as described by hooks (2000) in her description of the “personal is political” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Massey, 1994, 1999). Indigenous women have historically had a different way of organizing gendered relationships that were different from mainstream caste Hindu groups, and which changed over time and varied across Indigenous communities. In colonial India, Adivasi women were subordinated and sexually assaulted by their masters and colonizers to destroy their autonomy and extract their labor. In the 1940s, the Warlis, of Western

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India, resisted oppression from their male counterparts, while resenting the exploitation from the land-owning classes, saukars and awaris. Women felt the urgent need to collectively halt sexual bondage, by reversing socially reproductive gender roles and the complete subjugation of militant Warlis’ solidarity in anti-colonial retaliations under the patriarch. Leftist activism misinterpreted the need for separate women’s organizations or failed to identify women as a separate class with their own needs and challenges, glossing over the very essence of socialism (Saldanha 1989, 1995, 1996). To understand the impacts of robust masculinist development on village women’s oppression, it is key to give precedence to women’s agency to crucially dismantle patriarchy and to reverse institutionalized and systematic violent exploitative thoughts and actions to radical feminist thought and action. Adivasi women were relatively unrestrained and democratic with their participation in all aspects of labor and control over their earnings (Chattopadhyay, 2012a). The importance of women gaining economic power within the existing social structures is embedded in the visions of revolutionary feminism.

References Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109–137. Benwell, B., & Stoke, E. (2006). Discourse and identity. Edinburgh University Press. Berman, M. (1983). All that is solid melts into air. Simon and Schuster. Blaike, P., & Brookfield, H. (1987). Land degradation and society. Routledge. Booth, D. (1985). Marxism and development sociology: Interpreting the Impasse. World Development, 13(7), 761–787. Chattopadhyay, S. (2012a). Getting personal while narrating the ‘field’: A researcher’s journey to the villages of the Narmada valley. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 20(2), 137–159. Chattopadhyay, S. (2012b). Adivasi insurgencies and power in colonial India. ACME an International e-Journal for Critical Geographies, 11(1), 55–80. Esteva, G. (1992). “Development” in the development dictionary. A guide to knowledge as power (pp. 6–25). Zed Books. Ferguson, J. (1990). The anti-politics machine. University of Minnesota Press. Flobre, N. (1988). Hearts and spades: Paradigms of household economics. In D. Dwyer & J. Bruce (Eds.), A home divided: Women and income in the Third World (pp. 248–262). Stanford University Press. hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. South End Press.

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Kothari, S., & Parajuli, P. (1993). No nature without social justice: A plea for cultural and ecological pluralism in India. In W. Sachs (Ed.), Global ecology: A new arena of political conflict. Zed. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell publisher. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Sage Publications. Low, M. S., & Lawrence-Zuniga, D. (2003). Anthropology of space and place: Locating culture. Wiley. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. (1999). The political place of locality studies. Environment and Planning A, 23, 267–281. Mehta, L. (2007). Whose scarcity? Whose property? The case of water in western India. Land Use Policy, 24(4), 654–663. Mehta, L., & Srinivasan, B. (2000). Balancing pains and gains: A perspective paper on gender and large dams (Working paper prepared for the World Commission on Dams). WCD Secretariat, South Africa. Mohanty, C. (1991). Third World women and the politics of feminism. Indiana University Press. Murishwar, J., & Fernandes, W. (1988). Marginalization, coping mechanisms, long-term solutions to drought. Social Action, 38 (April-June), 162–178. Pieterse, N. (1998, January). My paradigm or yours? Alternative development, post-development, reflexive development. Development and Change, 29, 343– 373. Institute of Social Studies. Roberts, A. (2008). Privatizing social reproduction: The primitive accumulation of water in an era of neoliberalism. Antipode, 40(4), 535–560. Saldanha, I. M. (1989). Attached labor in Thane: A historical overview. Economic and Political Weekly, 1121–1127. Saldanha, I. M. (1995). Drinking and drunkenness: History of liquor in colonial India. Economic and Political Weekly, 30(37), 2323–2331. Saldanha, I. M. (1996). Tribal women in the Warli Revolt: 1945–47: Class gender in left perspective. Economic and Political Weekly., 21(17), 41–52. Whitehead, J. (2003). Space, place and primitive accumulation in the Narmada valley and beyond. Economic and Political Weekly, 37 (40), 1237–1256. Zimmerer, K. S. (1996). Changing fortunes: Biodiversity and peasant livelihood in the Peruvian Andes (Reprint 2019). University of California Press.

CHAPTER 3

Historical Appropriation of Land and People: In the Adivasi Heartlands of Western India

Abstract This chapter invites an examination of the colonial modernization and civilizational processes that aggregated the foundations of the politics of colonial forest management. Social/scientific forestry was instrumental as a technology for the reconfiguration of space, tools, instruments, and material resources that revolved around the discourses of conservancy and preservation of forests. Native and Indigenous lands were leased to local contractors by colonial foresters, who transformed vast tracts of forest commons into barren lands for the subsequent growth of commercial forests. Indigenous livelihood practices as shifting cultivation, hunting, and gathering were gradually barred. Indigenous people were used as laborers in plantation industry and forced to practice sedentary cultivation. Keywords Nature (-culture) · Commodification of nature social/scientific forestry · Shifting cultivation · Hunting-gathering

Nature is a production function that is in disagreement with the profitdriven production methods (O’Connor, 1988). The nexus of knowledge and power and institutions of exchange and governance have altered and commodified nature for accumulation through appropriation and through dispossession of land-based people from their surroundings © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4_3

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rupturing their linkages with nature (Castree, 2003; Harvey, 2009). On the subjugation of nature, O’Connor points to the relevance of time as significant toward different conceptualizations of nature. There exists an idea of dualism that validates the dependence of humans on nature. Take for example the bond between the Apache people and their land; if forced or detached from their land, they believe their blood is drawn from their bodies (Miller, 1996, 286). However, Western thought profoundly programmed mainstream societies toward identifying nature and humans as two elements of many elements. According to Nicolaus Copernicus, the sun is the center of the solar system, with the Earth and humanity as individual elements in the broad scheme of things. This notion objectifies nature, leading to a theoretical separation of nature and people (O’Connor, 1988, 21). Here, the purpose and the essence of the universe are reduced to commodities, objects, things, elements, or raw materials, while people are separated from their lands to free their labor for waged-based works. The understanding of nature as separate from humankind poses a danger to the ecology in mechanisms of capitalist production. Marx argued and O’Connor expanded on the contradictions of capitalism that occur through accumulation by forcible usurpation of land-based people; then overproduction by the concentration of this wealth in the hands of a few; followed by economic crisis and worker/peasant revolutions. In this chapter, I detail how the harvest of forests through silviculture and scientific forestry in the colonial era was possible by dispossession of Indigenous people who were reliant on these resources. The disconnect between Indigenous people and nature made them available for work at plantations or forest-based economy for meager wages. However, the Indian autochthonous people protested this constant theft and brutal systemic exploitation of their community and the surroundings. In India, the significance of forests in Adivasi lives can be found for a long period of time through their livelihoods, which applied shifting cultivation, animal grazing, collecting, and hunting practices. This dependence of tribal communities on nature is expressed through their rituals and taboos that epitomize preservation of nature. The myth of creation or gayana represents the symbiotic connection between the forest and tribal subsistence (Baviskar, 1995). During my ethnography, villagers lamented about crop failures and acute marginalization in rehabilitated villages. In the past (submerged) villages, they relied on a variety of forest produce for food. They had herds of cows, hens, and goats who could subsist

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on the forest pastures. Likewise, they collected honey, lac, leaves, fruits, flowers, tubers, berries, and mahua barks for oil and numerous other items from the forests. Much these were exchanged for spices, clothes, salt, or tools. If there would be a medical emergency, they would sell a hen or a goat for money. During monsoons, the trees that fell off were used to build or renovate houses. Routledge mentions a villager who, instead of migrating in lean seasons for wage work, said “we are doing cheek ki mazdoori, meaning they were collecting and selling resin from halai tree”.1 Villagers would boast that during droughts, the wilderness was their money lender. What Parajuli (1991) explains as “ecological ethnicity”, Routlege evokes as a “pre-emptive erasure” of ethnic cultures. The massive felling of trees for dam building, according to Routlege, has caused a disconnect between ethnicity and ecology because tree held a significant value to the local culture and livelihoods. Moreover, whenever this link with the forest was severed through the commercialization of the landscape by the reduction of the value of trees (Routledge, 2003, 250– 252), Indigenous people all over the world covertly and overtly protested. Marxist scholar Henri Lefebvre most adeptly and admirably identified the transformation of non-commodified spaces, through imperial and postcolonial developmental projects, to commercial spaces as “abstract space”. Abstract space is built space; it is the space of the outsider or of the developer that generates capital, which abrogates history by transmogrifying spatial relationships interlacing geography with the world market. Lefebvre thereby outlines that the “verticality and scale of dams” creates a naked violence, altering the landscape and lives of local people (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991, 98; quoted from Whitehead, 2003, 4230). This produces a parallel between scientific and managerial concepts of spaces that were manipulable via primitive accumulation associated with dam displacement (Whitehead, 2003, 4230). Here, the forests on which the Adivasis culture and survival relied were converted into an abstract space through obdurate-partisan preservation and conservation policies. The colonial civilizational projects, forest management practices, and strict control over forests persisted in complex articulations and mentalities of hybrid development and modernization agendas in the contemporary Indian state. Immortalizing social or scientific forestry, the colonizers reserved the commonly held environmental communes from local forest

1 A tree from which resin was extracted.

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users toward conservation and preservation of the feral lands. Unprecedented British-led interventions of commercial forestry enclosed Indigenous lands, setting radically different priorities that altered the ecological balance and cultural fabric of the Indian society, exposing their subjects to rapid industrialization and consumerization. Scholars (Troup, 1980, 1990; Tucker, 1983) argue that colonial accounts on revenue, excise dues, and other incomes generated from forest products establish that efforts to execute surveys and itemize natural reserves, though ostensibly projected to aid good governance, were, in fact, an attempt to tax and take away resources. After the 1850s, the commercial forestry precipitously damaged the ecological basis of Adivasi shifting cultivation, causing the Indian autochthonous people to lose their rights over their lands, forests, and fishing grounds. Terra Nullius in Latin means no man’s land, empty space, or land that is not occupied by anyone. This term signifies that these lands were occupied by (Indigenous) people whose social or economic practices were not recognized as “civilized” and sedentary as per European standards or ethos. It is only after ILO and UN passed their respective stipulations that Indigenous people and their lands received some protection from rapid appropriation. Nevertheless, the legal vestiges of colonial terra nullius persist in the abstract conception of space, as found in the isomorphic, homogenous, and geometric built spaces of contemporary developers who continue to impact diverse local place-based histories. The rapid imposition of terra nullius from imperial times can be found in post-developmental sovereign states through large development projects like the Sardar Sarovar dam, which ignored Indigenous “legally-tenuous entitlements”, statutes, rights, culture, privileges, or authority. Close to terra nullius is the concept of “trusteeship”, which means a person’s land or property can be managed, controlled, or administered by another person deemed more responsible or competent (Potter et al., 2008, 6–7). Similarly, the practice of “eminent domain” gives absolute power to the sovereign to appropriate in the name of development or greater good. Applying these three concepts, I argue that meaningful space, symbolic space, and cultural space of the local Indigenous peoples were transformed into objectified and commodified space to generate capital from resource mining. Activist scholar Whitehead (2003) details that through the process of mapping the Sardar Sarovar project (SSP), lead to the erasure of neighboring villages of Vasava, Bhil, and Bhilala and their links to culture, history, myths, and stories. Comparably for the

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James Bay Project, Hydro-Quebec ignored the Indian treaty rights and Indian linkages to their lands, as property or assets from the past. During the construction of the SSP, the minister of irrigation in India stated that “the government didn’t have to move a finger for resettlement; the tribals would leave their habitat like rats from their holes when the waters rose” (Patel, 1995, 182; Whitehead, 2003, 4223). These histories serve as an illuminating backdrop to the current policies whereby the liberal democratic government is unevenly and callously distributing and maintaining resources, instigating larger power struggles, and impoverishing Indigenous peoples lives. The Sardar Sarovar dam stands as a symbol of development, a monument of structural and direct violence that has subverted, contested, and transformed traditional environmental practices, knowledges, institutions, and the cultural fabric of the Indigenous communities reliant on these landscapes, thus giving birth to liberatory movements that embody resistance. Colonial social forestry and the post-colonial projects speak to environmental degradation framed by development, which interweaves history, power, and politics. However, national development is not limited to the Indian state, but is embedded in all contemporary global structures and nation-states, which are expanding through a fast injection of capital, which paradoxically dismantles the everyday life of numerous people, especially those who are reliant on nature in innumerable ways.

Social or Scientific Foresty The forms and patterns of colonial rule that were established during nineteenth century in India were sculpted by the flow of information through which it was learned, transformed, and consolidated collectively as colonial knowledge (Alfred, 2008; Ludden, 1992; Troup, 1990; Washbrook, 1981). However, Sivaramakrishnan (1995) argues that instead of focusing on distinction between local and foreign knowledge, it will be more productive to analyze the basis of the knowledge that was manufactured within the frame of specific historical, political, ecological, and cultural contexts and frameworks. Instead of looking into any particular cultural backgrounds of Indigenous people, it will be worthwhile to understand what manifested the production of local knowledge and how this knowledge is neither a “system nor an alternative rationality”, but rather a situated practice. The special knowledge of a place and its spatial history is generated through the people who live there, traverse

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the landscape intensively, make use of the space, and alter it for their survival. Historians and sociologists have often delved into the ideological and intellectual processes in which particular branches of science have developed. Similarly, the standard terms that enabled the development of scientific forestry omitted the traditional sites of application, so that these places become sites of scientific and technological systems. The terrain of implementation makes robust changes to the production of scientific knowledge which was linked with colonial governmentality. This linkage refers to the pressure of forest department to expand, standardize, and propagate universal and replicable scientific management models that cooperate with larger bureaucratic forms of government, which direct the selection and codification of forestry procedures. There is, then, a conflict between fitting forestry into wider universe of managed landscapes of production and distinguishing it as a unique, separate, and professionalized activity. The work conducted under this conflict suggests a constant production and transformation of science in its applications, often within the context of development (Sivaramakrishnan, 1995). The institutionalization and professionalization of forest management through its engagement with issues of governance, resource conservation, and enhanced productivity also brought scientific forestry into the realm of emerging development discourse in the late nineteenth century. It may be true that “we do not yet know enough about the global, regional and especially local historical geographies of development – as an idea, discipline, strategy and site of resistance – to say much with any certainty about its complex past” (Crush, 1995, 8). The genealogy of specific elements of scientific forestry has normalized strategies of modern state and the idea of irreducible difference between modern and premodern societies that characterize development. Cultural operations were often dependent on local ecological knowledge and understanding the social mechanisms by means of which scarce labor could be secured for silvicultural tasks. In performing the routines of forestry and through colonial sports, forest officers assumed the mantle of authority centralizing their functioning by the end of nineteenth century. Forest species were marked for felling when forest technicians could not tell which individual trees could be felled (Agarwal, 1995, 1997; Sivaramakrishnan & Agarwal, 2003). These were the travails of transitioning from lumbering to forest regeneration, which meant that the forest department required foresters to shift their mentality from harvest practices to all the details of growing trees. The possibility of modifying flora and crop composition

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of this landscape was perceived through the powerful lens of institutionalized science, as argued by a conservator “we should here step in and assist nature … and by these means add greatly to the value of the estate” (Sivaramakrishnan, 2003, 275). The system inherited from colonial times was variously decentralized than centralized with the onset of democratically elected governments. There were significant continuities between the pre-colonial and colonial state, notably in forest destruction and monopolization of valuable forest resources. However, there were differences in ideologies and concomitant technologies of rule between the two historic times. Arguably, British forest policy as it emerged after 1858, when India was integrated into the Empire, bore the stamp of forest regulation and management that had been carried on in different provinces, under East India Company rule. Escobar (1991, 658–682) says, “the demarcation of field and their assignment to experts … is a significant feature of the rise and consolidation of the modern state. What should be emphasized however is how institutions utilize a set of practices in the construction of their problems through which they control policy themes, enforce exclusions and affect social relations”. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, orientalists argued feral landscapes of the tropical colonies as obstacles to progress while the primordial survival practices as unscientific, primitive, unsettled, or unsustainable. A specific knowledge can be gleaned from imperial diaries and beliefs on scientific forestry that presupposes and institutionalizes the legitimization of social or scientific forestry reinstating Foucault’s (1977, 27–28; Scott, 1990, 1985) firm convictions on power-knowledge interconnections. In Agarwal’s (1995) words, superior races steered the wheels of progress and the replica of imperial mentality of control surfaced in discursive articulations of the wild nature or wilderness. For instance, Richard Davis (2006 [1897], 260) wrote traveling through colonial Honduras: … what is to be done with the world’s land which is lying unimproved; whether it shall go to the great power that is willing to turn it to account, or remain with its original owner, who fails to understand its value. The Central Americans are like a gang of semi-barbarians in a beautifully furnished house, of which they understand neither its possibilities of comfort nor its use.

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Forests received widespread apathy before nineteenth century. The clash of cultural values between European colonizers and Indigenous people fomented to reinforce the conviction that forests were impediments to the expansion of agriculture and the building of infrastructure. An extensive analysis of forestry records in the last quarter of the nineteenth century concludes forests as a primary source of revenue (Stebbing, 1922, 345). Colonial foresters devised a body of knowledge on marketable natural species via representations of forests through which they defined expertise and manipulation of local structures of authority. Landscapes were portioned into discreet jurisdictions; managerial knowledge was defined; and different modes of management were formulated. Within the internal politics and bureaucracies of forest management lay the tangled politics of state making. By implementing directives, the British administration included forests in the market economy, declaring the demarcations of areas under state control that would produce surpluses through forestry operations (Hurd, 1975). These policies were shaped by intellectual proclivities of the imperial state but were implemented by native administrators and compradors (Indian rulers, wealthy farmers, and money lenders). In the early 1840s, India’s recently expropriated green spaces were cut and burned at a fierce pace, dispossessing native population reliant on these wild jungles creating the space for plantations and infrastructure developments needed to transport the raw materials to industrial cores and ports from where they were shipped to Britain. The rapid conversion of wild landscapes to commodified mixed broad leaved hard-wood forests (bamboos, jackfruit, tamarind, mahua, berries) and monocultures of profitable and marketable soft-wood species (teak, pine, eucalyptus), swept through all forested lands India. Following this advent of scientific forestry, the British initially restricted the Adivasi’s access to forests, while encouraging colonial hunting expeditions for forestry products and sanctioning killing sprees of animals for pleasure. These activities excluded the Adivasi from forested lands by destroying the forest ecology, thus preventing hunting, and gathering, and thereby altering the composition of forest plant and animal species (Ablion, 1926; Guha, 1985, 1989; Whitcombe, 1972). Stebbing’s (1922) detailed accounts of scientific forestry practices identified the frenzied destruction of wooded landscapes that led to decreased water levels in large water bodies, creating water scarcity for the locals while deteriorating the land and soil qualities.

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According to professional foresters, crucial extraction of timber and other major and minor forest products could be obtained only by separating the local forest dwellers from the forest commons. The tropical colonies of the mid-nineteenth centuries in British India, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and the Philippines became the “laboratories of modernity” (Metcalf, 1979). The 1878 Forest Act restricted the Adivasi hunters and gatherers from the collection and sale of forest products. After the forest laws were enacted, the Adivasis were excluded from these commonly held lands, which served as an integral part in Adivasi social, cultural, and historical traditions. Following exclusion from the forest commons, Adivasi cultural livelihoods as cattle grazers, fisher folks, bidi (local cigarettes) makers, and wild berry or (mahuda) flower and seed collectors were undermined (GOI, 1961a, 1961b; Guha, 1994), and many resorted to unlawful means for meeting their survival needs (NAI, 1878). Commons are resources that people hold in common for generations which are not used for nonmonetary subsistence and held in common through customary rights and rules. However, rather than existing simply as shared resources, the commons represent a common pool of non-commodified resources fulfilling people’s daily needs. Commons are social relations. The verb “to common” addresses the social processes that create commons. On the process of commoning, Linebaugh (2008) writes that, in the first half of the eighteenth century, English commoners maintained certain customs belonging to their practices of using the commons, which forced the King to identify the rights of people. Commons hold a discursive space in relation to land enclosures in pre-/early capitalism in England, to Italian autonomia 2 movements, and to the alter-globalization movement. In contrast, earlier primitive accumulation by feudal lords involves the expropriation and dispossession of commoners by enclosing common lands and other resources, as was done in the early capitalist period by the English nobility. This trend is congruent with capitalistic practices in postcolonial spaces in the manifestations of economic progress through Indigenous dispossession. The top-down theory of development of the 1940s echoes these imperial visions of “improvement of humanity”, but, in particular, rationalization of the colonial engagement toward enclosing 2 Set of anti-authoritarian/leftist movement that emerged in 1960s from workers communism (operaisimo). Later, in the 1970s, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became evident.

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lands for exclusively commercial use is buried in the classical orientalist discourses of trusteeship3 (Agarwal, 1995, 1997). Conceptually, “the commons” have traveled through history and time.

Receding Shifting Cultivation The British deplored shifting cultivation4 as they perceived this farming practice as a waste of land and resources. An essentially pejorative and logical perspective, this simplistic view was held by the Western scholars of the Orient. On contrary, cultural anthropologists have provided abundant documentation to show that, under conditions of steady population growth and sustainable use of resources, shifting agriculture was a perfectly tenable practice (Elwin, 1939b; Geertz, 1988). The hill Marias, of Bastar district (MP), are one of the few surviving Adivasi communities who still exclusively practice jhum cultivation. According to Elwin (1945), “Abujhmarh (forest) is an impregnable fortress, wild, lonely, exalted and exhilarating home of the Hill Marias”. With shifting cultivation implementation of the long fallow system, soil left fallow is given time to rest following cultivation, allowing restoration of the cultivated plot and of adjacent forest vegetation. In the context of tropical Madagascar, Jaroz (1996) argues that relations of humans with non-human nature are politically and economical shaped by colonial and post-colonial rationalizations, where alternative practices of shifting cultivators are perceived as irrational. Similarly, von Haimendorf (1982) has shown through his research that some of the largest ecologically healthy forests existed in areas where slash and burn cultivation was carried out, for centuries. In contrast, plowing obliterated forests wherever it was practiced. Note that I am not romanticizing Adivasis that rationally used the forests beyond the extent it meets their survival interests. Likewise, 3 In 1940s, Truman gave a speech on development. He believed that the USA as a hegemonic economic power and a modern industrialized country can assist in developing targeted countries of the Global South. This idea emerged from enlightenment (civilizing the poor and underdeveloped masses), industrialization (capitalist modes of production, fast corporatization, and commodification of resources), trusteeship (holding onto the property or resources of developing countries or countries coming out of colonialism until they are modern/developed), and economically advanced (to reflect their imperial metropoles). 4 Among many names, I have alternatively used the terms “slash and burn” and “jhum cultivation” for shifting cultivation.

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shifting cultivation is not the only sustainable agricultural practice for these forest landscapes. Their agricultural practices or other practices of harvesting the forest continued as a cultural practice and forests were worth protecting to their survival benefits. However, their unique spiritual balance, reliance, and reverence for nature are both true and false. Peet and Watts (1996, 261) caution against generalized assertions, like that of Shiva’s (1991) stating that Indian and other environmental movements are creating “new values, new rationalities, new economies for a new civilization”. On the one hand, scholarly research and colonial administrators created the knowledge on tribal pre-science and their cultures as backward, while, on the other hand, they recognized the Adivasi’s ecological consciousness and wisdom. These contradicting ethnocentrisms emerge to join those of Western environmentalisms that situate the huntinggathering tribes and sedentary agriculturalists in ambiguous positions on an evolutionary scale, which has faced criticism within studies of political ecology (Baviskar, 1995; Orlove, 1984; Wilmsen, 1989). Following Gramscian Marxism, Donald Moore writes of resource use that is not only directed by economic interests but that shaped by cultural (class, caste, gender) identities, historical understandings, and experiences surviving from the environment. Marxian ideology and post-structural critique of modernity, enlightenment, and reason invited a substantively new set of academic articulations on alternative rationalities of production relations. According to the British, the methods of burning land cover assumed by the shifting cultivators rarely allowed trees to reach a marketable girth and concluded that this erratic, wasteful, and irrational practice was harmful to nature, and claimed that the cultivation practice slowed down and obstructed the moral and material well-being of the Indigenous communities (Cleghorn, 1860). Moreover, shifting cultivation was warranted as highly unsustainable because the British wanted to transform the fertile hill tracts into plantations of commercially viable species, such as sal and teak. This reasoning supported the formation of the state forestry law, which underscored the production of tea, rubber, and coffee plantations (Cleghorn, 1860) over slash and burn cultivation of food crops for Indigenous and local consumption. As such, in areas where plantation agriculture could be practiced, portions of Coorg and Kerala, shifting cultivation was banned, and the Adivasi shifting cultivators were pushed to the inaccessible and less fertile terrains (NAI, 1878, 30). Under very strict surveillance and bureaucratic pressure, slash and burn farming practices were gradually and forcibly transitioning to plow agriculture, thus altering

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Indigenous cultivators’ cultural and economic practices and overall ways of living (Elwin, 1939a, 118). Elwin writes: At every turn the Forest Laws cut across his life, limiting, frustrating, destroying his self-confidence… it is obvious that so great a number of offences would not occur unless the forest regulations ran counter to the fundamental needs of the tribesmen […]. A Forest Officer once said to me: “Our laws are of such kind that every villager breaks one forest law every day of his life”. (Elwin, 1963, 115)

Laws were so rigorous and restrictive of Adivasi’s everyday life that most traditional activities were considered a violation of the law. Illegality was a creation by the state to prevent Adivasis from using their farming practices or resources from forests. Ironically, though the British and Indian contractors encroached on Indigenous lands, the Adivasis were identified and tortured as thieves. The forest policy of 1894 simultaneously bolstered the claims that the state held supreme control over forests while enacting policy defining shifting cultivation as ecologically destructive and a barrier to state forestry practices. The Adivasis were forced to accept a subservient position under the new settler-capitalistic production regime (Gadgil & Guha, 1992). Not only the British, but wealthy Indian farmers, moneylenders, and contractors were equal shareholders in the process of conditioning and disciplining the Adivasi lifestyles. Despite these pressures, the shifting cultivators were undeterred by state exploitative efforts; they organized to resist the politics of forest policies and continued to follow their traditional rotations of slash and burn cultivations. The forest department turned to the police to arrest the cultivators and release them on the promise that they would take to plow or sedentary cultivation. The transparent unwillingness of the Adivasi “Bhaigas ” to give up the traditional cultivation was entrenched in their cultural foundation. “Bhaigas” believed that they were born as protectors of the jungles and the land (Elwin, 1939a). Over many years, the tension between over shifting cultivation, forestry policies, and plow-based agriculture had allowed the state to suppress broader questions on Adivasi customary rights to their forest commons. Unfortunately, British forestry policy documents and those implemented by the Indian Constitution after independence shared similar policies on acceptable Indigenous agricultural practices. Despite a century of state control of forests, the Indigenous people still held their belief

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that the forests belonged to them (GOI, 1961). Throughout India and across time, the slogans of tribal protests voiced their cultural relationships with nature (‘Jangal Zamin Azad Hai’—forests and lands are free gifts of nature). The protests concisely oppose state control and the commercial use of forests, as evidenced in the Chotanagpur area, where the Adivasis removed the teak saplings and replaced them with native species. Elwin (1939a) aptly noted that, to its Indigenous practitioners, shifting cultivation was not merely an economic system with certain ecological impacts, but a way of life; slash and burn practices formed the core of the tribal peoples’ mental and material culture. These local experiences, challenges, and knowledge as discussed by movements, non-governmental and governmental organizations, academics and activists add to the conventional repertoire of political ecological discourse (Zimmerer, 1996).

From Hunting/Gathering to Plundering During the British transformation of Indian forests from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the majority of Adivasis practised either hunting-gathering or shifting (jhum) cultivation, with some communities implementing settled agricultural practices cultivating fertile plains or forest clearings. Ironically, the British utilized Indigenous insights on native plants while forcing them cultivate marketable species for a pittance. Colonizers surreptitiously stalled shifting cultivation, appropriated fertile forested lands for plantations, and forced Adivasi hunter-gatherer communities to migrate. This caused serious transformations in tribal living practices. Struggles over livelihood and survival varied from one place to another. The modernization endeavors of the colonizers created heightened tensions in social relations to nature and cultivated the paradoxical relationship between environment and development. As Carney’s (1996) research shows, development and commercialization of Gambian wetlands are symbolic and representational to patriarchy and gender rather than class. Deteriorating social and economic circumstances fomented women’s solidarity in the form of militant protests. Schroeder and Suryanata (1996) argue that “the idiom of environmental and resource contestation is expressed through generational differences, ethnic identities, lineages or other aspects of local “tradition” (religion, for example), all of which are subject to constant manipulation and reinvention”

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(Peet & Watts, 1996, 226). In India, Adivasi Bhil insurgencies arose in response to years of subordination from colonial and native comprador exploitation. The British forest service preferred the plains dwellers, as they more easily adopted the cultivation of commercial crops and lumbering of valuable forest species. However, the Adivasis were forcibly moved by the British onto less fertile hill lands less agriculturally prolific areas or inhospitable forests. Adivasi Bhil protests were demonstrations of discontent for these poor conditions. Resistance took the form of looting and plundering, contingent upon the Adivasis’ relations with plains dwellers and their brutal marginalization by the native compradors. Hence, their struggles for survival over natural resources exhibit how the panoply of social and cultural relations to nature are situated. My field observations (excerpt below) suggest that the social spaces of livelihood and ecological struggles are historical and contextual. I observed5 similar processes while traveling to a submerging village,6 appreciating the geographic ruggedness of the landscape in MP where banditry still exists. Two government field officers and I visited few remotely located villages in MP that were yet to be submerged. We started from the R&R office also called Sardar Sarovar Nigam in Gujarat, on a muggy morning of August 5 The following is my autoethnography. I have attempted to describe my personal experiences throughout the manuscript along with theoretical and conceptual details of the Narmada valley and its people. Autoethnography is grounded in adding voice and reflexivity to Social Science research. This technique is a mix of personal and cultural to make space for non-traditional forms of inquiry and expression. This (qualitative) approach ideologically challenges the genre of inquiry. 6 A village which was in the government’s list to be submerged if the water level rose due to the dam or reservoir. The submerging villages of Sardar Sarovar were categorized into three groups by the monitoring and evaluation reports published on the affected villages. They were dam-site village (zone-1), rock-fill dyke village (zone-2), and interior village (zone-3) based on their diverse geographical and social settings (Chattopadhyay, 2006). The Sardar Sarovar dam is geographically situated in the northern part of Nandod taluka of the Bharuch district, Gujarat. This region is tucked in the ranges of the Satpura hills, which is also known as Garudeswar. Altogether, there were 19 submerging villages (consisting of 141,484 people), among which eleven villages were situated in Nandod taluka, five villages in Naswadi taluka, and three villages on southern bank of the Narmada. All the villages that were going to be inundated were located in the Satpura range on an undulating topography with a sparse settlement distribution amidst a scanty forest cover. Among the submerging villages, the village of Chharbara was the smallest with six households while Ghader was the largest village with 376 households. Approximately 1,500 households submerged and a total of 2,000 households. Zer was the least affected village.

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20, 2004. Shekhar was the Adivasi male field officer, 58 years old. By the time, we completed all formalities at the rehabilitation office, it was already noon. Prior to the visit, the R&R unit coerced me to write a testimony that praises the government’s relocation efforts. I was compelled to remove the terms such as development-induced displacement or forced dislocation or gendered social transformations from my writing. At the time, my need to see the submerging villages was so acute and necessary that I considered this harassment as a conditionality that allowed me to visit those villages. Although I appeared as a compliant researcher, I made this difficult choice with desperation to get a glimpse of submerging villages as I was aware that I could not visit those remote locations unsupervised or without government support and transportation. At the time, I felt like a vulnerable researcher, but I consider this action as a tactic that was required to have a perspective on the submerging villages. As I needed to know if in reality submerging villages were as described in policy publications or witness the losses villagers describes in their stories and testimonies. The riveting accounts of the villagers on their lost spaces (see Plates 4.1–4.10) aided me to not just argue the state rehabilitation efforts but helped me witness the enormity of cultural and social changes displaced communities endured that they traditionally held and established with their natural surroundings. Also appreciate the diversity of livelihood and cultural practices that different Indigenous communities practiced. In spite of knowing that I might not be safe travelling with two unknown officers, I externalized my fears while trusting my instincts. My longing to visit the villages and learn about the villagers’ situations and experiences was so intense that it overpowered my reservations and suspicions. Although I dreaded the unknown, the villagers always treated me with respect and genuine hospitality. In fact, though I felt vulnerable at times, I neither sensed threat nor was my privacy or dignity invaded by any village participants. By late afternoon, when the sweltering sun was directly overhead, we passed through a region of low barren hills of red lateritic soils embedded with drier and coarser stones and pebbly paths that were fiery hot. The landscape was painted red, as though it was bathed in blood. Although the landscape was sterile and rugged, the dampness in the air, maintained a sticky mix of dirt and humidity. The roads were so jagged that it took several hours for the jeep to progress small distances. I could spot a few Bhil hamlets dispersed approximately ten to fifteen miles apart. The country seemed wild and favourable as a refuge to marauding expeditions. At the time, when I was thinking that these hillocks could serve as hideouts for children playing hide and seek or serve as protective shelters for fugitives, the field officer accompanying me stated, “Madam, these areas

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are known for Adivasi bandits”. Upon hearing this, I started getting goose bumps. Without noticing my reactions or unease, he continued, “they hide behind the rocky humps and attack every passing vehicle from all directions, making clamorous sounds leaving absolutely no route for the vehicles to escape. They puzzle passersby’ with the loud sounds that echo against the rocky barriers and their animated bodies freeze any action from the other end”. He added that the Bhils are known for their agile bodies, adept strategies, and fast movements which aid them to rob from travellers. They strike the travellers irrespective of gender or age. The Bhils considered them as the warriors or historically the Kings of these jungles – hence they consider that they should not take anything without hard labour not even steal. Moreover, they hit or pounce, strike or pierce arrows and spears then ask for money, ornaments or similar priceless belongings. Guha and Gadgil (1989) wrote that the Bhils drew upon their material and ideological resources like, bows and arrows, knowledge of hills, sheltered inlets, and opportune moments to loot in the past. Adivasis honed on trying to survive intact, holding closely to the hills to live. So acute were their survival needs at the interface of severe marginalization, extreme exploitation, vanishing wilderness, changing livelihoods that they retorted to banditry. In its entirety, the hunter-gatherers were less organized to resist the forces of the state and modern economy compared to shifting cultivators, who were more strategic, united as a group and capable of militant resistance. In my dialogue and observations with Shekhar, I observed and attested to the accuracy of Madhav Gadgil and Ram Guha’s analysis. As I absorbed the severity of the situation, I thought about how I could protect myself if Adivasis bandits attacked. I gradually removed whatever jewellery my mother forced me to keep on my bare hands, neck or ears, used by the comfortable middle-class as signs of privilege. Class is a performance too, of the privileged!

The field officer also mentioned that banditry by the Adivasi Bhil farmers often occurred during the times of abnormal monsoons; without rain, the poor villagers found it necessary to steal or perish. This account was no orientalist or anti-Adivasi propaganda or legend to describe the ferocity of the Adivasis personifying the fierceness of nature, but an accurate depiction of the impoverishment of Adivasi Bhils that compelled them to indulge in banditry as the only alternative to survive. It was not just the economic precarity, but also the natural settings that constrained and shaped the different survival tactics. Between 1899 and 1901, a devastating famine broke in the sterile areas of Central India. The British dealt differently with Adivasis during a famine and attempted to allay

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the Adivasi suffering from hunger and scarcity. To ease sufferings of the Adivasis, they imported grains for the poor households. Famine relief started granting remission of revenue. Incidents of looting became sporadic where most of the Adivasis secluded themselves. At present, with more and more lands being appropriated by different kinds of development projects or state-corporate-comprador use, Adivasis depend mainly on agriculture, as other livelihood mechanisms have come to a halt. For all practical purposes, hunter-gatherers are extinct on the Indian subcontinent, although small communities exist in a few pockets of the Indian Ocean islands (Guha, 1994). Currently, most of the Indigenous hunter-gatherers have become sedentary. Due to prolonged exploitation, material structures of society serve as the terrain or landscape of resistance. In this respect, social relations and productive powers limit the forms of culture within which movements-from-below originate. Although production relations succinctly define political and cultural settings, they are not entirely limited by the ecological attributes of the region, such as the biota, topography, and climate (Guha, 1989, 5–6). de Certeau’s (1988) use of tactics refers to the manner in which the oppressed “poach” is effective here. de Certeau illustrates that people poach like nomads, as an act of resistance. However, he maintains that it is inherently the weak who poach, compared to the strategies of the dominant. According to de Certeau, these tactics are functional only through control of time and not space. In circumstances of divergent forces or antipodal unequal structures of power and multiple points of applications, covert resistance—as explained by Scott’s (1985) “weapons of the weak”—seems most functional for those who do not have the means to directly challenge those in authority. For example, the Baigas poached within spaces of power and found ways to escape colonial surveillance to continue hunting and shifting cultivation at different locations after their hunting and gathering practices were confined or prohibited. Legal restrictions were avoided by encroaching, intruding, or taking away. Everyday resistance included various forms of tactics and manipulation to escape the gaze of colonial overseers’ panoptical procedures, such as the choice of terrain, time and place, or moments of relaxed supervision (de Certeau, 1988). Today, Adivasi retaliations suggest the need for a systematic and refined analysis of the strategies of colonial rule or the mentalities of post-colonial Indian state that have followed the mindset of the colonial governance, and which engage us in questioning the legitimacy of the state and the

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corporates. For example, in Sundar’s the Burning Forests (2018), she captures multilayered failures of the Indian state to provide basic life needs to its Adivasi populations, and also the miscarriages of the Indian judiciary and democracy. She leads her discussions on the origin of the state-led war against Maoist rebels in Bastar District, Chhattisgarh, Eastern India, and describes the difference between counterinsurgency carried out by Indian democracy versus any militaristic regime. Broadly, she debates what it means to be an Adivasi citizen in India caught in armed conflict between the state paramilitary forces and Maoist rebels. Unfortunately, Foucault’s hesitation to challenge the conventional wisdom of power and the dramatic silences on colonialism, capitalism, or neocolonialism, in general, appears to ignore or play down, without justification, the concentration and operation of colonial conglomerates in centralized imperial locations.

Historical Subordination The gradual eradication of shifting cultivation was simultaneous with the establishment of non-Adivasis in lowlands which followed the British agenda for progressive utilization of land and forest resources through plow cultivation. As part of this policy regimen, the Kanbi Patridars, a group of wealthy Gujarat farmers (compradors ), occupied the Shahada and Taldoda districts of MP in producing opium and cotton according to British desire for efficacious cultivation of these crops. This occupation pushed the Adivasi from their lands, with service as bonded laborers as the only economic option. In Gujarat, the lands were passed to the hands of the Leva Patridars (Epstein, 1988, 2), who farmed near Jhalod district of MP. The Patridars were moneylenders (Vanias ) and effectively obtained ownership of lands as the Indigenous people fell into debt traps. Acts of repeated exploitation forced the Adivasis to move to the infertile hill tracts where their holdings were unattractive and marginal (Aurora, 1972). Accordingly, the Vanias were less interested in occupying the new sub-marginal Adivasi land holdings but remained inclined to profitably exploit the Adivasis by giving loans and honing their profits in unequal terms of trade (Aurora, 1972, 181). As described by Scott (1990), the persistence of any kind of domination can be harmful for the society as it arouses resentful attitudes among subordinate groups and, as such, the Vanias activities raised some instances of strong resistance from the Bhils (Hardiman, 1987, 17). The spawning of deep-seated hatred and

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the generation of Indigenous resistance were in response to the continuous extortion by the British and the native compradors. For instance, the Adivasis raided the Patridars, who were settled agriculturists of the plains, and the travelers who passed through Adivasi areas (see previous section). Although production of grains by the Indigenous people was reduced in the sub-marginal areas, food grains were traded to the cities and towns in bullock carts until railway lines connected the interior villages. Hardiman quotes, a deputy collector of that time: the inhabitants of the Mahals (the area north-west of Alirajpur, MP) has begun to feel advantageous of the introduction of the railways to their very threshold […] the benefit to the Bhil cultivators would have been minimal as they never received the market value of their crops. It was, rather, the grain dealers (money lenders) who were enriched by opening of new markets through the railway. (Hardiman, 1987, 19)

Further exploitation of the marginal farmers in different parts of India occurred through taxation and land tenure systems, which together produced radical colonialism (Wolf, 1982, 247). The collection of excise duties was applied as contracts to the traders who advanced loans to the Bhils in exchange for their rights to the produce. The Vanias, acted as intermediaries between the administrative officers and the Bhils, forcing the Bhils to grow groundnut and sesame for cash returns, while strengthening the Vanias’ ties with distant markets (Aurora, 1972, 88). As a result, in this imposition, the Bhils were diminished to a subservient position losing their freedom to grow subsistence crops. The continued drain of the state’s revenue extraction and depletion of natural resources following politicized cultivation practices made survival more precarious for the Adivasis in the banks of rivers Narmada and Tapti in Western India. The forest policy of the post-independent Indian state borrows from the colonial British forestry policies an analogous determination to control the growth of marketable tree species for industry. The conditions of oppression and marginalization dynamically continued to impact Adivasi lifestyles and environment (Arnold & Guha, 1995; Crosby, 1986). After independence, the Indian state embarked on progressive development and industrialization with a populist welfare component of anti-poverty programs, to safeguard their infant nation from injustice and forms of exploitation (GOI, 1978, 4). However, Indigenous rights

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to forests were never recognized and the Adivasis continue to be alienated from the area’s genuine gains of power or prosperity. According to a report published by National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER, 1963, vi), the Indigenous areas are rich in mineral resources with enormous potentiality to provide industrial raw resources. The state further highlighted that, as agricultural lands are insufficient and cannot serve the needs of even half of the tribal populations, industries and mining activities should be developed in these regions. Therefore, NCAER declared that industries should be developed and localized in Adivasi areas to serve the wider interest of the nation and the longterm interest of the Adivasis. In hindsight, the industrial encroachment into Indigenous lands were legalized and normalized, with positive statecorporate economic effects, but with continued dehumanization of the Indigenous peoples who continued to attempt to live on those lands. In the wider interest of the nation, the state exercised its prerogative in claiming eminent domain to acquire lands for development projects, while justifying the acquisition as a need for the greater good of the people (Singh, 1986). These projects were seen as harbingers of national progress and were implemented with the justification that they would bring about tribal development (Cernea, 1991). In truth, pursuit of these policies and resulting rapid depletion of natural resources occurred largely in the tribal areas, utterly violating the interests of the Adivasis. Since the era of British colonialism, eminent domain has been rationalized in the unwritten arrangements for common property management in the Narmada valley and throughout India. That all land was potentially state property or becomes state property for the greater good was best exemplified and elaborated in the Land Acquisition Act VII (LAA) of 1894.7 In this act, the British administrative authorities defined the 7 The Indian legislation was at the centre of debate of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (LAA) which was formed during the colonial period. The LAA is the statutory statement of the state’s power of eminent domain which provided the state with ultimate control over land within its sovereign territory. Prior to the independence of India in 1914 and 1938, minor modifications were made to the LAA on the process of acquisition of land. However, the post-independence economic development justified acquisition or appropriation of land for public purpose and denied the person who owned the land and his or her right to exercise choice as to whether they were willing to relocate or remain in their land (Fernandes & Chatterjee, 1995). The 1984 amendment (Land Acquisition Bill [LAB]) attempted to revise the LAA on inclusive grounds, such as the state can only obtain land if the LAB provides compensation for the acquired land. The LAB legitimized the land holder’s rights. Arguably, LAB ignored the rights and existence of land holders

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commercial value of major and minor forest products (Washbrook, 1981). Forest legislation did not share the implementation or the interpretation of domain but relied on the Act as rational and progressive doctrine beneficial for public interest (Sivaramakrishnan, 1995). While forest administrative jurisprudence acknowledged the institution of common property as a natural right, it nevertheless decided that common land was a property of civil government (Embree, 1969). “This paternalistic approach, a powerful mix of conviction and coercion, undermined traditional structures of authority”, through the implementation and rationalization of development projects (e.g., Narmada valley projects). Enclosures, such as through the above-mentioned process of eminent domain, effectively fence off the commonly used areas to prevent Indigenous peoples from accessing their common property resources. Relocation following enclosure contributed to mass poverty among the Adivasi commoners, which led, in some cases, to migration to urban areas for employment at unskilled work (Kohli, 1987). According to Baviskar (1995), mega projects are transforming self-sustaining Indigenous communities to urban beggars. Linebaugh (2009) argues that enclosures can lead to mass migration, pauperization, and criminalization of local people. As the state appropriates commonly held resources, its previous owners or users are transformed into criminals accused of misusing or misappropriating state property (see Baviskar, 1995). Mies and Shiva (1993) have argued that, historically, modernization projects have persisted in subversion of the “other” (nature, women, Indigenous

who could not prove their ownership to land or did not have papers to prove their ownership. Hence, this group of people who held the land for generations or lands on which people had customary rights lost their claims to land. They were not compensated if they lost their land through state intervention (Ramanathan, 1996). Therefore, the LAA was controversial for consigning extraordinary power to the bureaucrats and the collector who used judicial process to dislocate the people without compensation. The judicial processes were short circuited, and the time given for dislocation was limited. The LAB ignored the Draft Resettlement and Rehabilitation (R&R) policy but largely followed the guidelines of the LAA. The provisions of LAB infringed on the rights of the poor who depended on natural resources for their livelihoods. These conservative notions of individual ownership and state acquisition of land were stretched unrealistically to envelop the shortcomings of displacement of large groups of tribal communities who were displaced for not have land titles. The LAB did not accept displacement as a traumatic outcome nor held the state responsible for resettlement with compensation (Fernandes & Thukral, 1989).

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people, and subordinated classes) through a total annihilation of their rights, production, culture, and knowledge (Jacoby, 2003). During colonial times and at present, the enclosure of the commons and the cascade of exploitation that followed created the proletariat, workers with a high dependence on the wage for their reproduction, and the accumulation of capital necessary to fuel the industrial revolution, wars, and consumption needs in England. Marx established that primitive accumulation is a precondition to capitalist development, which Rosa Luxemburg confirmed is a precondition to dispossession and argued as an ongoing process. Today, with long-term loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, this process of fencing commons, now called “new enclosures”, threatens rural livelihoods with the externalities of development projects, environmentally degenerative industries, mining, and the like (Midnight Notes Collective, 1990). Perelman (2000, 31) points out the functionality of the concept of “primitive accumulation” by mapping the silent effect and control of the market in the ongoing exploitation of labor and alienation of original producers. Harvey (2003) engages this concept to show the redistribution of wealth from the lower classes to the wealthy proprietary classes, and from public to private sectors with state initiatives. DeAngelis (2001, 67–68) suggests that capital identifies new spheres of life, colonizes people’s priorities, and encloses social spaces, commons, and protected areas—the later prevents native rights holders from using the resources for survival. Critical analyses have moved from discussing primitive accumulation in the context of time, geographic space, or location. This process is now discussed in terms of structural and direct violence exerted on different kinds of bodies placed at the lowest tier of hierarchies beneath non-human animals and nature (Guthman, 2011), forceful control over women’s bodies in medieval European witch-hunts (Federici, 2004), and dispossession of minority populations due to extractive industries (Sundar, 2001), usurping squatters from one slum to another. In this way, unproductive bodies are filtered out as wastes of the society, and subsequently disciplined, punished, and anguished, rendering forces of domination visible. O’Connor (1988) notes that the reproduction of capitalism crucially depends on its “conditions of production”, which include various forms of infrastructure and labor force with particular characteristics, abilities, and environmental niches. They argue that trade agreements are mechanisms of enclosing the commons and sanctioning rights to corporations to pollute and cause eco-social crises impacting marginalized people in

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given areas. Primitive accumulation is of key importance in that it attends to the ways in which neoliberal globalization breeds inequalities along lines of class, gender, and race. In addition, this definition clarifies the process by which primitive accumulation simultaneously forecloses democratic possibilities and atomizes socially excluded people by breaking their community and nature-culture bonds (Roberts, 2008).

Radical Developmentalism Radical scholarship on environmental-ecological issues has illuminated people-environment connections and people-land relations (Agarwal, 1992; Baviskar, 1995; Merchant, 1989; Mies, 1986; Mies & Shiva, 1993; Mies et al., 1988; Shiva, 1988; von Werlhof, 2007). “Nature”, from the standpoint of ecological politics, comprises and combines “nature in production”, which has entered the human world by various modes of appropriation. This makes people’s subsistence on nature both “social and ecological” (Clark, 1993; Chattopadhyay, 2014, 4; Grundmann, 1991; Kovel, 2002). In connection with Indian indigeneity and ecology, Guha (1985) writes that the Adivasi-organized protests attested to the degradation of the environment and promoted sustainable use and the restoration of natural resource bases. Guha’s analysis critiques technology-driven management of Garhwal and Kumaon Himalayan forests, and acknowledges the lack of attention to peasant autonomy, while contributing to the scholarship of proletariat oppression. Here, I conclude with a reference to Chipko as symbolic of struggles against continuing accumulation and appropriation of nature. Chikpo’s writing follows a long neo-Marxist tradition of militant particularisms, which DeAngelis (2001, 17) defines as “social barriers” to “accumulation” (Chattopadhyay, 2014, 6–7). Some Adivasis communities have stayed in close proximity to nature, reliant on their environment for subsistence, historically experiencing greater ecological vulnerability through colonial conservation strategies or post-colonial development programs. Radical Marxist scholars like Harvey (1993) surmise that these communities’ survival practices are damaging. According to my observations in the Narmada valley, Adivasi uses of nature were far from sustainable, but I cannot deny that there is also an element of natureculture worship, care toward their cattle herds, a sense of protection of their natural surroundings, and a general wisdom around the significance of the environment (Baviskar, 1995, 160–169). To conclude, the

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history of state forestry practices is indeed a bitter account of social conflict. Merciless expropriation and disciplinary domination fueled colonial modernization, forest management, and land resettlement practices. Although these practices displaced Adivasi from their lands and way of life, they were also the motivation for Adivasi retaliations. Post-colonial modernization projects, like the SSP, and their attendant relocations continue to not only devastate Adivasi material livelihoods but create a wider loss of cultural autonomy leaving them with nothing other than their labor power.

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CHAPTER 4

Everyday Lives of the Tadvis in the Narmada Valley

Abstract Patriarchy and fast commodification of nature and agriculture through relocation have systematically altered women’s (re)productive tasks while spatially reconstructed gendered household roles, practices, decision-making processes, and activities. Like the commodification of science, subsistence livelihoods directly impacted the resettled villagers’ lives and women’s political participation, productive capacities, and representation. This chapter speaks to the devaluation and domination of Indigenous peoples and their resource basis through profound social transformations. Keywords Social transformation · Patriarchy · Commodification of agriculture · Hinduization of Adivasis

… we recognize and honour their way of doing things, not because it is old and picturesque but because it is theirs, and they have as much right to their own culture and religion as anyone else in India. It means that we must talk their language, and not only the language that is expressed in words but the deeper language of heart. It means that we will not make the tribes ashamed of their past or force a sudden break with it, but that we will help to build upon it and grow by a natural process of evolution. (Elwin, 1964, 245)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4_4

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The paucity of Jangal (forest), Jal (water), and Jameen (land) has been relevant in Adivasis lives due to foreign interference, encroachment, enclosure, and transfer of their resources. In this context, “foreign” refers to non-Adivasi compradors, industrialists, government, politicians, and pre-colonial/colonial ruling subjects. Following independence, most of the Indian ruling nationalists treasured their autonomous government over the new nation-state yet duplicated Western developmental practices through a rapid injection of industrialization and urbanization as a way to progress rapidly through development projects. Gujarat’s major dams, including Sardar Sarovar, Karzan, Ukai, and Madhuban, all of which were constructed on Adivasi lands (Lobo, 2002, 4849). Once an Adivasi leader said, “with the growing industrialization, non-Adivasis are moving into occupy Adivasi lands. In the last decade, in just two blocks of Surat district, 40,000 acres of land have changed hands” (Setu, 1999, 11). Primarily, Adivasi lived in isolated forested, hilly, semi-arid areas. Hence, deforestation, agro-based industrial growth, infrastructural development, mining, or dams have deprived Adivasis of their food, income, and livelihoods. Due to the skilled nature of work at these development sites, the majority of the Adivasis cannot work in these settings. Nearly 60,000 Adivasis migrate to Baroda and more to Surat, for seasonal unskilled work. In order words, tribal areas have become recruitment sites of surplus labor (Devy, 2002, 39). Looking back, the Narmada valley projects were charged with a gamut of social movements over water, land, and forest. Terminology such as environmental degradation/harm, ecological damage, or environmental decline is often used to describe the role of humans on the deterioration of environmental well-being/health. Excluded from these offerings are the non-human impacts on the environment, though this does not mean that studies on environmental degradation have altogether dismissed the effects of natural agents of erosion or climate hazards. Be it anthropogenic or natural element of degradation, the bare physical effects of deterioration of environment result in one-third of India being classified as unproductive. Due to the expansion of wastelands, the associated drought and lack of potable water will be felt more acutely than the most priced fossil fuels (Guha & Martinez-Alier, 1997). In the Environmentalism of the Poor, Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997) write that, in India, the water table has dropped by five meters due to an uncontrolled exploitation of water for domestic and industrial needs. This exploitation has resulted in an increase in soil salinization, erosion, and decline of

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groundwater quality and level. Narmada valley dams connect to classism, sexism, and ethnicity—as the dams have disproportionately marginalized some states and their people (Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh), others have prospered economically (state of Gujarat): To put it in more explicitly in ecological terms, these conflicts pit “ecosystem people”- that is, those communities which depend very heavily on the natural resources of their own locality – against “omnivorous” individuals and groups with social power to capture, transform and use natural resources from a much wider catchment area; sometimes, indeed, of the whole world. (Guha & Martinez-Alier, 1997)

Arguably, “ecosystem people” are the primary sector producers, whereas Indigenous people or people dispossessed of their lands and resources are exploited by the “omnivore” people who are the politicians, government, policy makers, and industrialists. Resource capture in the name of industrial development has left the ecosystem people and rural areas marginalized while benefiting the cities and omnivorous people. Conceptually, “environmentalism of the poor” refers to the struggles, challenges, protests, movements against the omnivorous people, stakeholders, and projects that result in the enclosure of the commons from ecosystem people for personal or corporate gain. In an effort to compensate for the losses incurred through colonial oppression, meanwhile employing the Western policies as the oppressors, large development projects like the SSP have moved forward in the name of national progress. The SSP has and will continue to destroy people’s lives by submerging invaluable forests, exterminating wildlife, and spreading waterborne diseases through stagnant reservoir water with devastating effects on Indigenous communities (Guha, 1994). The Save Narmada movement is one of the glaring examples of “environmentalism of the poor” in India that give voice to the ecological refugees and speaks against the conversion of forests, farming and grazing lands, and fishing grounds for economic development. In Staying Alive, Shiva (1988) argues that small sustainable projects could conserve natural resources without disturbing the majority of the population’s traditional practices or the environment’s health. During the span of my ethnography, government officials, policy makers, and academic scholars have argued that the resettled Adivasis are better off in rehabilitation sites compared to their lives in the jungles (forests). I argue that state development agendas blatantly justified the uneven distribution

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of project benefits and massive transformations in gender-specific ways. Some people suffer for the greater good and their lives are not considered with sensitivity (Baviskar, 1995; Dhagamwar et al., 1995; Dwivedi, 1999; Ramanathan, 1996). The Adivasis have countered the statist-corporate forces to protect their commons in a manner that, in light of their bid to protect the forest and animal species upon which they rely for survival, might be argued as proto-ecologist. While studying the insubordination of Adivasis, Skaria (1997) makes a point of the notions of “wildness” or sedentary. For millennia, tribal people who lived in remote locations leading pastoral or nomadic lifestyles have been in duress compared to civilizations of the plains. The history of the tribals documents an extended process of assimilation into the mainstream caste Hindu or into the Kshatriya-Adivasi continuum in the pre-colonial and colonial times. Areas of wild lands occupied a different “epistemological” space— jangal—the term that does not necessarily mean forest or mountains but a space or place outside the orbit of mainstream people, civilization, and state control. So “jangal polity” existed as a strained space between the Adivasis and the state-comprador class of settled regions. Until the Maratha rule, the Adivasis and the Marathas lived symbiotically (or at least partially co-existed as outlined by early scholars). The Marathas engaged in taking levies through raids on the jangal, as was the case in Saurashtra or paying salaries to jangal chiefs as means of alliance or friendship. Alongside developed the colonial celebration of wildness, the forest—the major valorized site of colonial culture in India. The sikar (hunt) and the wild people were considered the exotic remnants of the simpler and nobler culture—as captured by Kipling’s The Tomb of his Ancestors. Therein, the Adivasis were depicted as willful, playful, wild, primitive, and indolent— childlike irresponsible young lives who were strongly dependent on their colonial superiors as in a permanent adolescence. Moreover, Adivasis were perceived as people who lacked intelligence and are punished for their dissent. However, Adivasis constructed new politics of resistance based on and in solidarity of the community of forest dwellers. These solidarities mark the shifting alliances and rivalries which fed into the politics of plains dwellers’ powers in highly complex ways. In this process, Adivasis have defined themselves as “autochthonous”, deconstructing the labels jangli, jungle tribe, and primitive and preferring to be known as Adivasi or original people—or by constructing the discourse that Adivasis, all over the world, need to be salvaged from extinction. This seems to be the appeal

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of many activist networks who are working in solidarity on Indigenous survival. The superior and inferior “civilized” and “wild” dichotomies were established after the British defeated the Marathas. The dichotomous relationship of the Adivasis and non-Adivasis has been glorified by the policy makers and the state in creating a discourse to support the civilization of the Adivasis. In a similar vein, a unique discourse has been created by the Bharatiya Janata political party (BJP) aimed at transforming Adivasis to Hinduism, assimilating them forcibly through Hindu schools, reducing the significance of their culture and language, and actively recruiting them to fight BJP’s religious battles against Muslims and Christians or other minority religions. Historically, it was the mission of the civilized to convert the wild into civilized, thereby justifying oppression and violence against hill Adivasis to eradicate the wild. However, Skaria (1997) cautions his readers against romanticizing the wild as imbued with a deep sense of loss of a past utopia as described by Scott (1990). The British treatment of the people in the hills and forests of India followed contradictory agendas for the creation of brutal enclosures in the name of environmental protection and conservation, while simultaneously conscripting Adivasis, with or without pay, to work in the plantation-industrial complex. The ideology behind replicating Western development relates to the colonial civilization agendas. I recall Fanon’s (1959)1 introduction of the term “anglophilia”, meaning excessive admiration of England or English ways2 by countries once colonized by the British/other European power conglomerates. Moreover, if we combine anglophilia and colonialism, it speaks to the specific affinity and reverence of once-colonized nations toward the colonizers. In the case of India, the ruling nationalists, policy makers, government and politicians’ ardent emulation of British ideals, ways of life, techniques of rule, and civilizational agendas (Heesterman, 1985) reflect Fanon’s contributions to the concept of anglophilia. In this chapter, and as evidence of the concepts described above, I detail the

1 Fanon (1954), Black Skin, White Masks, quoted in Abraham, p. 19. Taisha Abraham (2007), Introducing Postcolonial Theories: Issues and Debates, p. 16, Macmillan Publishers India. 2 Also see Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary for Anglophilia.

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stories collected from the Tadvis on their living conditions and sociocultural practices in their past (submerged) and present (rehabilitated) villages.

The Land and People of Narmada Valley The Adivasi belt stretches from the Eastern district of Gujarat to south of Rajasthan in the north, Madhya Pradesh in the east to Maharashtra in the south. There are thirty-two talukas in districts of Panchmahal, Vadodara, Sabarkantha, Bharuch, Surat, Navsari, Valsad, and Dangs with a total population of 55%. This space is designated as Adivasi talukas3 by the government in the interest of development programs. Gujarat has two subpopulations known as Kolis and Bhils. Kolis are lower castes classified in the Indian constitution as Other Backward Castes (OBCs), they claim to be Kshatriyas, and they are 20% of the Adivasi population. The Bhils are spread in the hilly regions of Gujarat, while the Kolis are from the plains. Bhils are known variously as Gamit, Vasava, Warli, Kokna, and Chaudhri, while some have retained their original name as Bhils with some use the suffix Dungri Bhil. Roughly two hundreds years ago, the Adivasis of Gujarat were called Bhils of the hills. A few populations of Bhils, Kolgas, Kotwalia, and others, who are isolated in remote parts, were classified as needing more assistance from development programs. Historically, the Bhils had interacted with the Rajputs; many times Bhili daughters were married to low rank Rajput chiefs. Historically, the Bhil-Rajput continuum or Bhil-Koli continuum is documented as being maintained for a variety of reasons, such as Bhils employment in the Rajput army. Bhils and Rajputs were found to coexist alongside in Idar, which was probably a princely state. There were small princely states, at times made up of a few Adivasi villages, such as Dungri Garasia, where Garasia prefix belonged to Rajputs. Even in South Gujarat, where Valia taluka in Bharuch exists within the Adivasi belt, Rajput landowners called Mahidas are found to exist.

3 A tehsil or tahsil, taluka, or taluk (in Hindi) is a local unit of administrative division in countries of the Indian subcontinent that is usually translated to township. Taluka is smaller in size than a district but bigger than a village. There are approximately 20 villages in a taluka with a total population of 20,000 people (see http://www.peoplefirsti ndia.org/chap).

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My ethnography studies the Tadvis who originally resided in Vadgam,4 Gujarat. All the villages I surveyed were located in the state of Gujarat, Vadodara district, Daboi Taluka. Construction of the SSP relocated 251 households with a total population of 1,514 (Das, 1982) from Vadgam to several villages of Gujarat, among which is Golagambdi, where 80 households were relocated. The majority of the population consisted of the Tadvis with very small proportions of Govals who were cattle herders primarily. The Tadvis were originally Bhils. The name Tadvi was given to the Adivasi Bhils, who relocated along the banks of Narmada. The term Tadvi is derived from the word Tatvi, where “Tat” means riverbank. Relocation of the Bhils to the banks of the Narmada is documented in the histories of dominance of commerce and colonial administration over the tribal hinterlands, which pushed Indigenous farmers to precarity. The British forced a lifestyle change from shifting cultivation to settled agriculture, enforced the state forestry laws, and thereby gained control over all the commercially valuable forests, while restricting the selling of minor forest products and toddy (locally made alcohol by the Indigenous people). Added to this, the state’s revenue exactions and the depletion of natural resources made survival even more precarious for the Adivasis. Famine could not affect the rich business classes (wealthy farmers, traders, and moneylenders) in the commercial villages and towns, who hoarded large stocks of grains (Aurora, 1972, 77). The only historical evidence of destruction of forests and its consequences on the poorer Adivasis were found in the immediate and enormous increase registered in the state’s income, mainly from land revenue, excise duties, and earnings from forestry.5 When famine visited the Indigenous lands, the Bhils migrated to the plains (Nimar) of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh (MP), and the banks of Tapti River to avoid the calamity (Das, 1982; Joshi, 1983, 1991, 2000). This chapter describes the geographical characteristics of the submerged villages where the Tadvis resided in the past, and the current socio-cultural and economic practices of the villagers in submerged and rehabilitated villages. Besides conducting fieldwork in Golagambdi, I also 4 I have conducted surveys with other Indigenous communities like Adivasi Bhils and Ratwas but I limit myself with details of the Adivasi Tadvis. However, throughout the book, I have provided the narratives collected from all the group interviews such as Bhils, Ratwas, and Tadvis. 5 For estimates on the extent of deforestation in colonial times in different regions of India, especially Western India, see Gadgil and Guha (1992).

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surveyed Kundi Uuchakalam, Sanoli, and Suryatalav. For the purposes of this text, I limit myself to an in-depth analysis on the past and present living conditions and practices of the Tadvis. My ethnographies were carried out in four rehabilitated villages where people originating from the states of Maharashtra, MP, and Gujarat were relocated. All the rehabilitated villages that I surveyed are located in the state of Gujarat. The Golagambdi rehabilitated village was relocated from Vadgam in Gujarat. The name Golagambi, referring to the village and the village chief, was a name suggested by the past director of Center for Social Studies, acronymously CSS,6 and was one of the first villages relocated following the Sardar Sarovar project. Once I established contact with Golagambi, I then selected other villages using a snowball-sampling technique.7 In my selected villages, I focused on problems encountered by villages, differences in compensation distribution, hurdles that were experienced by relocated villages, villagers’ ethnic composition, accessibility to transportation nodes, and provisions of civic amenities through the state resettlement and relocation (R&R) compensatory package. To be accepted by the villagers and to avoid barriers as a woman researcher without a knowledge of local dialects, I employed the help of an Indigenous middle-aged male participant, named Sunil Bhai Tadvi. A male research assistant, Bhavin, of the South Gujarat University also assisted me with the ethnography. My research consisted of household surveys, which preceded my collection of narratives. In total, I surveyed 365 households in four villages, collecting information on the demographic characteristics, house-types, socioeconomic characteristics, and infrastructural facilities. The surveys were based on semi-structured interviews. During household surveys, I began to build rapport with the villagers, which helped me in collecting detailed narratives on their experiences in submerging villages,

6 CSS conducted monitoring and evaluation surveys for the government. Judith Whitehead has conducted detailed analysis on government misconduct and dishonesty of institutions like CSS is not releasing information on villages before rehabilitation and after. The reasons toward gatekeeping information from general public and field researchers was to harbor R&R discrepancies, ecological damages, extent of submergence, and failures of the state toward the resettlement of SSP refugees. I have no hesitation to write that I one of the library staff members provided me with photocopies of evaluation and monitoring reports in exchange of a price. 7 Snowball sampling is a selection technique, widely used in social science research, for developing a research sample where existing study subjects recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances.

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relocation challenges, and current struggles with a variety of changes they were living through. I collected 40 of these narratives, with participants chosen to represent differences in income, class, gender, and age across the tribal groups present throughout the villages. The villagers spoke in Hindi but sometimes switched their narratives to tribal dialects. They used single Gujarati words too. When languages other than Hindi were used, Sunil helped me understand the dialogues. In the initial days of my survey, I listened to the villagers without writing anything as they had the fear that I would document their grievances and expose them to the government officials. I wrote the conversations from memory every evening and read the stories to the villagers, thereby rewriting them with corrections by the villagers. Later on, I transcribed the Indigenous stories and thematized them following my research objectives. Throughout my surveys, I did not use tape recorders. I felt that recording would threaten the participants, with the result that they might minimize or modify their narratives. Additionally, the government officials, NGOs, and submerging villagers of MP were also interviewed with very broad questions, which provided important background information of the villagers’ previous lifestyles, the R&R policies, and the mechanisms of R&R. Names of participants are replaced with pseudonyms to protect the identity of the villagers. Physical details of the villages were collected to provide geographical location of the villages. Golagambdi mainly consisted of Tadvis (who are classified in Bhagats and non-Bhagats ethnic groups), with a few Brahmins and Govals (caste groups) interspersed. The lifestyles of the Bhagats are a close match to the lifestyles of Hindu Brahmins. Bhagats practice strict vegetarianism, total abstinence from alcohol, physical cleanliness, and daily worship. The Hinduization of the Adivasis of this region started through the reform movements in eighteenth century. Today, educated Adivasis consider alcoholism, ignorance, and disorganization as the main points of weakness which led to their economic exploitation. Hinduization and Hindutvaization of Adivasis Archival research shows that, in the sixteenth century, the non-Indigenous populations were concentrated in a few pockets as minorities in the plains of Surat and Valsad districts, Gujarat. In 1719, when the Peshwas entered Gujarat, they first established their rule at Songadh in Surat District, Gujarat. All the Peshwas, during the regime of a mighty Maratha ruler

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called Chhatrapati Sivaji Sambhaji belonged to Deshastha Brahmin, seen as subordinates to the Maratha King or de facto leaders of the Maratha confederacy or nominal rulers. During the final years of the Maratha Empire, under the British East India Company they were demoted to titular leaders. Under the titulage of Baji Rao I, the Maratha Empire extended its dominions to Gujarat. After the turn of the eighteenth century, the forest tracts were cleared and lands that were more cultivatable were available to small groups of non-Indigenous people. This group of migrant plains-dwelling agriculturalists became the major landowning group (Kanbi Patridars, Brahmins, and Parsis ) (Baviskar, 1995). Kanbi Patridar was the name given to owners of large tracts of land who settled on the banks of the Narmada and Tapti valleys. Parsis are an ethnic group and Brahmins are the uppermost Hindu caste group. The moneylenders trapped the Adivasis as their lands had low yields and forced them to borrow money for sustenance. Successions of foreign invasion and dominance of Hindu rulers invaded the tribal socio-cultural and economic systems, forcing them to accept the social change by restructuring and reorganizing their ways of living. An intriguing example has been provided by Desai (1979), regarding the change in excise policy and its impacts on the Adivasis. A new excise policy was introduced known as the Madras system, by which the government sold by auction the right to sell liquor and toddy. Everyone was prohibited from selling liquor and toddy, except the government. The Adivasis lost their right to tap their own trees and distil toddy for themselves. They had no money, and they were not accustomed to the monetary economy. Adivasis drank a lot (“not restrained”), but when making toddy was prohibited, they needed money to purchase toddy, and so became reliant on labor to provide money necessary to purchase toddy. Indebtedness grew overtime and Adivasis began to lose their lands, becoming either tenants or laborers (Desai, 1979). A fragmented, uneducated Indigenous society was no match for the well-organized comprador (land-owning, business, and ruling) classes. Over time, the economic differentiation between these two classes converted the former to farm servants. The worst affected were the Dublas who were converted to bonded laborers, with a social position very similar to serfs in fifteenth-century Europe. The Dublas were bonded based on debts, which continued for generations. As a largely illiterate population, they lacked the understanding of the terms of their debit. Similarly, their lack of familiarity with monetized commerce left them

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unable to handle money, so they continued to remain bonded. Later, with education, the new generation of Indigenous youths became conscious of the reasons for their exploitation and actively participated in reform movements. A brief history of the reform movements is mentioned in the following paragraphs. All the leaders in the reform movement believed that the root cause of the Adivasi misery was traditional social life and alcoholism. So, in different parts of India, the reform movements motivated the Adivasis to abstain traditional practices and drinking habits, while simultaneously welcoming Hindu traditions as a path of modernization to end their oppression. A legend relates how, in a village of Western India, Dharia Bhai and his partner erected a temple with Hindu idols. They preached Hindu scriptures, persuading people to give up drinking toddy, follow a vegetarian diet, bathe regularly, sing devotional songs, and thus enforced a shift in tribal social practices as instrumental in uniting different Indigenous groups to Hinduism. Later another of reform movement, popularly known as the Devi movement, gave a new dimension to the earlier template. It was believed that a supernatural power was roaming in the area, exhorting the people to stop drinking alcohol. The British government and native compradors wanted the continuation of Adivasi alcoholism so they could extort the Adivasis by charging high revenue. The religious movements alarmed these dominant groups who reacted aggressively and continued to enforce drinking on the Adivasis. One report claimed that the government troopers physically held Adivasis and forcibly poured liquor or toddy into their mouths. Because of fear of torture and harassment from the landowners (the Parsis and British), the Adivasis ignored the message of the Devi and relapsed into their old drinking habits (see Hardiman, 1987). According to Skaria (1997), Adivasis of Dang experienced a loss of power and autonomy to outsiders. Their malaise was further exacerbated by abolishing witch killing by the British in 1847. This led to a new motivation for the Devi movement from 1922 to 1923, which focused on taming female power and abolishing the drinking of liquor and eating of meat. Women were tested to see if they were witches, and then exorcised. Throughout the movement, after many men had fallen short of the movement’s goals, women held a prominent part and stayed true to the commands of the Devi. In this way, the women asserted a new space for themselves. The Devi movement was a protest land transfer to Parsee traders, forcing Adivasis to buy liquor from Parsi taverns (Hardiman, 1996).

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The reform movements were scattered and erratic. The Adivasis active in these movements were split into two groups: one that adopted Hindu practices and another group that continued to maintain traditional tribal culture. Within the anti-prohibition movement, the British liquor shop owners and the traditional Adivasis who kept the contract of selling toddy were united (Desai, 1979). The Devi movement was meant for the purification of the Adivasis above all as forms of assertive conversion of Adivasis in which Hindu motifs were appropriated in tribal lives in a way that posed a challenge to Parsis traders, who at some instances forced the tribals to go back to drinking. Many caste Hindus and elite classes referred to Adivasis as remaining jungalis asserting their positions of power. Nevertheless, the conversion of Adivasis to Hinduism labeled this group of Adivasis as a purified version of themselves, marking their diligence, selfsufficiency, and literacy by Gandhian nationalists who consolidated these social changes progress toward the formation of Gandhian ashrams in Adivasi areas. The reform movements were scattered and erratic. Not all “reform” groups were literate and educated. The Tadvi Adivasis were influenced by the teachings of Saint Vishwanath and were classified into two groups. The reformed Adivasis were popularly known as Bhagats and the traditional Adivasis as non-Bhagats. The literate Bhagats opted for government jobs and were exposed to urban lifestyles, while the non-Bhagats did not change their eating habits or other traditional daily practices. Though this was not a caste division, the Bhagats held a feeling of superiority over the non-Bhagats. While conducting the surveys, I sensed the hierarchies of power in similar Indigenous groups that were shaped by Hinduization of Adivasis. Socio-cultural rituals also varied among the Adivasis of otherwise similar ethnic backgrounds. I witnessed Sunil, who is a Bhagat, points at his neighbor living opposite to his house, announcing loudly “he is a Bhagat too, but when he eats meat, he hangs his sacred thread8 on a tree branch”. Sunil’s sarcasm seemed to allege that his neighbor is a fake Bhagat as he does not maintain vegetarianism and other higher standards of life required of Hindu practices. During my ethnography, I encountered many disparaging jokes between Bhagats and non-Bhagats. Counter movements or resistance to oppression was not uncommon. In 1856, the Bhils of Gujarat revolted against the British. Similarly, under 8 Sacred threads are given to Hindus when they take religious initiation and avow to abide a pious way of life embedded with high spiritual and social values.

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the guidance of Guru Govind, the Bhils of Panchmahal resisted veth (bonded labor); Warli revolts were occurred for similar causes. The nineteenth century was marked by counter-interactions with non-Adivasis, especially Hindus, Muslims, and Parsee traders, owing to exploitation and profound repression by these traders upon the Adivasis. In post-colonial times, the Bhil social and physical geography had been reduced to state linguistic divisions completely overlooking their dialects and languages. According to Lancy Lobo (2002), the Gujratisization of Adivasis happened in Gujarat, MP, and Rajasthan through the practices of speaking and writing Gujarati; even their Indigenous accents were overridden in an effort to be identified as Gujaratis and not Adivasis. Hindu schools actively pressed Adivasis into mainstream Gujaratis culture, while overwriting their cultural/linguistic differences. Alternatively, Adivasis were Hinduized by the state; in each of the decennial censuses, the column on religions is increasingly filled with claims for Hindus, such as Gamits as Hindu Gamits and Chaudhuris as Hindu Chauduris. The Bhagat or Bhakti movement, and later a host of others, speedily Hinduized the Adivasis. Becoming a Hindu was seen as a way to climb the social ladder, such as Bhagats (Hinduized Adivasis) and non-Bhagats (Adivasis), or Mota (big) Chauduri (Hinduized) and Nana (small) Chauduri (tribal). The designations as “small” and “big” show the class difference within the same tribe. This layer is co-opted by the Adivasis, who were in the top of the social hierarchy, following the same lingo as state officials, politicians, police and judiciary, and other nonAdivasi voluntary organizations. Historically, Gujarat politics has placed trust upon caste politics (reign of Chief Minister Madhavsinh Solanki),9 and with the resurgence of Bharatiya Janata Party, their trust shifted to religious politics. Hindutvaization is different than Hinduization. The latter was more spontaneous from the interactions between Adivasis and Hindu traders. However, I will argue that it was less an innocent process of assimilation and more of a silent coercion by powerful caste Hindu groups. These groups were covertly supported by the state and development policy makers as well as implementation of infrastructural and mining projects. Whereas Hindutvaization was initiated by Sangh Parivar in an organized manner by targeting the Adivasi powerful male chiefs, it was 9 He was elected by Kshatriya, Muslim, Dalits and Adivasis but overthrown by antireservation riots proceeded by upper caste populations.

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also introduced through local Adivasis as an anti-missionary campaign. This campaign followed Advani’s rathyatra, ramshila pujan, and Ram jammobhumi creation. Instead of focusing on the causes of Adivasi marginalization and Adivasi political economy—Sangh Parivar and BJP have diverted Adivasi attention to violence against Muslims and Christians. There has been extensive mobilization of Adivasis against Muslim lives and property (Ahmad, 2002). Lobo (2002) compares Hitler’s consolidation of power through the dissolution of the Wiemar constitution as a phenomenon that is happening in present-day India under the BJP central rule. This comparison is based in extremist Hindutva leaders who are engaged in unchallenged contestation of the constitution, presidency, election commission, and Judiciary. In the politics of Gujarat, 20% of the population are upper caste Hindus, Brahmins, Patidars, and Banias (business class), with the remainder of the populations as a minority underclass composed of Adivasis, Dalits, and Muslims. The former have not allowed the latter to enjoy the fruits of power except symbolically and have pitted the underclass against each other, diverting their attention from the dysfunctional state, violent industrialization, and degenerative development. According to Devy (2002: 222, 47), poverty and hatred is a deadly potion that is administered to Muslims and Christians who are perceived and acted upon as the enemy of the state and of the Adivasis people. The bare bodies of the Adivasis are recruited and exploited to gather information on other minority communities, and to violently contain these minority groups through the exaltation of the historic Adivasi-Kshatriya continuum (Lobo, 2002, 4849). Here, I am referring to a specific relationship between Adivasis and Kshatriyas as a continuum. The following sections identify living conditions and standards, village morphology, socio-cultural conditions, and economic conditions of past (Vadgam) and present village (Golagambdi) (Plates 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, 4.11 and 4.12).

Morphology of the Villages: Vadgam (Past Village) and Golagambdi (Present Village) The past village (Vadgam) (Fig. 4.1) has no recorded history of its own. It was a village mostly inhabited by the Tadvis with 251 households and a total population of approximately 1,500 people. Vadgam was located in the Nandod taluka, Vadodara district of Gujarat. Indigenous Elders believed that the Tadvis migrated to Vadgam 200 years ago.

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Plate 4.1 Elderly person making toddy (submerging village, Madhya Pradesh)

from

mahua

dooli

65

(flowers)

Plate 4.2 Houses were primarily made of mud with title roofs or thatched roofs (submerging village in Madhya Pradesh)

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Plate 4.3 The picture of the hamlet was taken from a distance (submerging village in Madhya Pradesh)

However, there were two completely different stories about the migration of the Tadvis. One story was entirely mythological,10 while the other was based on a generational tale stating that people were forced to move to escape three consecutive famines in the Narmada valley in early nineteenth century. This change in geographical location led to the transformation of the peoples’ livelihood from forest-based nomadic living to sedentary agriculture that was practiced along the banks of the river. The hilly parts of the village were divided into settlement clusters following changes in the landscape such as steep slopes and occasional monadnocks (isolated and conspicuous hills standing above the landscape). There were two

10 According to the villagers of old generation, they were living in the Pawagadh hill ruled by King Patai. During a dance festival, Goddess Durga joined those dancing women in disguise. The King being attracted by her beauty not knowing she was the Goddess proposed her to be his queen. The Goddess was enraged with anger, cursed his kingdom, and left. This resulted in crop failure, death of human and cattle, and war with the neighboring kingdom. So, the villagers migrated to the banks of river Narmada to escape the disaster (Das, 1982).

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Plate 4.4 Long/extended pipe leading to the farmlands from the river Narmada (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh)

broad settlement clusters11 called Upla (upper part) and Nichla (lower part. These settlement clusters were segmented further due to nucleating 11 Settlement clusters are called falias in local language.

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Plate 4.5 Numerous pipes drawing water from the river for irrigation (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh)

of families.12 However, these settlement clusters were not crowded with houses. From the narratives I collected, it was clear that the villager’s houses were dispersed, with no mention about any specific use of community space. The present village, Golagambdi is a planned village where 80 households are resettled from Vadgam. According to Ram Bhai13 Tadvi who was the village chief in the submerging past village of Vadgam: […] relocation sites were first shown to a group of village Elders, all men. Golagambdi was shown to five people who were considered as distinguished people of the village. Then it was shown to all the families to be relocated. After the people chose the relocation village, the surveyor distributed house plots and cultivatable lands. Vadgam had approximately 251 households. About 165 households were rehabilitated

12 After marriage, the family breaks down into nuclear families. These close relations stay together in nucleated families in the same settlement cluster. 13 All my respondents are given pseudo-names to maintain privacy of the information provided by them.

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Plate 4.6 Site of worship/temple (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh)

in different villages such as Simaria, Malu, Dharampura, Kasundar, Krishnapura, Kaleria, Lunadra and other places in Sankheda and Daboi taluka of Vadodara District and in Naswadi, Tilakwara, Rajpipla taluka of Narmada District. (Ram Bhai Tadvi, male respondent, age 65, Interviewed by author, 15th May 2004)

The Golagambdi rehabilitated village (Fig. 4.1 and Plates 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16, 4.17 and 4.18) is divided into settlement clusters or small blocks of houses with roads passing in between every four and five houses. The village is connected with a main road leading to cities and towns.

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Plate 4.7 Site of worship—temple of Mahavir (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh)

Buses and different kinds of public and private transportation are available in the village throughout the day. Residential house plots of 502 square meters were given to all the relocated families. The houses are made in such a manner that some yard space is saved to grow vegetables or food crops. Influential villagers, such as village chiefs and large landowners of Vadgam, received cultivatable lands close to their houses, whereas common people of the village received lands located three to five kilometers away from their house plots. The center of the village has a school, a playground, and a community center. At three locations within the village, there are water taps and one main water tank from which villagers receive water for their household use and consumption. The village also has a shop where groceries upon which the villagers are dependent, such as spices, oil, grains, packed snacks, soaps, and washing

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Plate 4.8 Stairs leading to the ghat/banks of the Narmada (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh)

Plate 4.9 Cremation ground in the banks of Narmada. The picture was taken from a distance (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh)

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Plate 4.10 Herds of goats (submerging villages, Madhya Pradesh)

detergents, and other household necessities are also available. Though villagers did not have experience in reliance on such consumer commodities in their past villages, their dependence on grocery shops and markets for household consumption is a cause for worry among many villagers who are aware that they require a fixed income to meet growing expenditures. Although most villagers practice only cultivation, a few villagers work in government offices and cultivate their lands with the help of

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Plate 4.11 Cultivated land, rehabilitated village, Gujarat

hired laborers from neighboring villages. In households where farming is shared among family members, at least one member must find secondary employment in cities. Access to civic facilities and connection to cities and markets are possible due to buses that travel from the villages to towns and cities throughout the day. However, the villagers complained about the increase in capital expenditure without any significant increase in their monthly income: [ …] outsiders keep telling us that the new land is better because we can have access to so many goods and services. But they forget that we will need money to access these facilities. If we do not get a good crop in one season, then it will be difficult to hire tractors, power-driven pumps, and use seeds and fertilizers. I have heard that in the city, one often has to pay for drinking water. I find it difficult to believe that our people will ever have enough money to fulfill our wants to the same extent that we did in the hills and forests. (A women respondent, Golagambdi, age 52, interviewed by author May 23rd, 2004)

It was not uncommon for me to hear stories that described daily discomfort over various spatial and economic changes encountered. For instance,

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Plate 4.12 The picture was taken of this vegetable grown in the gardens on the house plots (rehabilitated village, Gujarat)

open spaces for defecation were declining, which made some villagers think of building sanitation structures. Previously, cattle were the primary source of wealth for women, but following relocation, there was no knowledge of local plants as well as a lack of grazing lands. As a result, cattle died or were reduced in numbers, with similar reductions in women’s wealth and related social standing and freedoms. Reduction of open spaces also created a feeling of spatial limitation, specifically among the elderly villagers. The cultivation pattern changed from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture, wherein the villagers were inclined

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Fig. 4.1 Location map of Vadgam (submerging village, Madhya Pradesh) (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006; Das, 1982)

Plate 4.13 Common site in rehabilitated villages where machineries were used for cultivation

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Plate 4.14 House of the most impoverished person (Type 3 house)—the owner was a single woman and parent of three young children (rehabilitated village, Gujarat)

to produce larger amounts of cash crops to attain income sufficiency. In the past, they had supplemented their diets with vegetables grown in riverbanks, minor forest products, and fish from the river. Women lamented that the new villages required a complete dependence on capital rather than on the resources which surrounded them at Vadgam. With relocation came changes to their consumption patterns; fish became a rarity, as it was an unaffordable item, and non-Bhagat peoples could not afford to maintain a diet consisting of milk, eggs, fish, and meat bought from markets in exchange of money.

Tadvi Places of Dwelling (Fig. 4.2) According to one of an Adivasi Elder’s of Golagambdi, their recollection of the past village before relocation was that: In the early 1920s, Vadgam had only one settlement cluster, consisting of 30 households or less. In the 1980s, the number of settlements increased

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Plate 4.15 Houses belonging to the people of lower economic and social status (Type 3 house) (rehabilitated village, Gujarat)

to 251 (Das, 1982; Joshi, 1983). The dwellings at Vadgam were different from the Golagambdi rehabilitated villages in their structural and spatial details. In the past, the interiors of the houses in Vadgam were simple with less compartmentalization. For instance, the places for cooking and sleeping were similar with a demarcation for cattle in some cases. The houses were made of mud and thatched roofs (called ‘Kachcha’ in the native language). Extensive amounts of wood from the jungle were used to construct these houses. All the houses were made of mud plastered bamboos. The roofs had country tiles14 that were made locally. The roof frames were made of logs. Earlier houses were simple with little or no compartmentalization. Later on in the 1970s, houses were being compartmentalized according to the need and household activities. (Bharat Bhai Tadvi, male respondent, age 72, Golagambdi village)

14 These are called country tiles as they were locally made by the villagers.

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Plate 4.16 Type 2 House–belonged to middle income groups (rehabilitated village, Gujarat)

The houses were categorized into three major groups based on size. The first category of house was small in size with no space for cattle. Families in these houses did not own cattle or had very few domesticated animals, which could be kept in open spaces. The layouts of houses were rectangular with a wall separating living and cooking spaces. Generally, houses had storage spaces, constructed in the living areas. The storage spaces were raised platforms made of bamboo or wooden shafts standing on four wooden posts to a height of eight to ten inches. This platform was used to store hay or fodder and some household necessities. Such storage spaces were common of all houses. In the second type of house, a wall separated kitchen and cattle space. The people whose houses were in this category were primarily agriculturalists or forest laborers with a few having temporary jobs in other villages or towns. The third type of house was rectangular and divided into two major spaces. The first half was called “otlo”, which had a partition in some cases. The second half was divided into cooking and sleeping areas. The area where the cattle was kept was either in front of the “otlo” or adjacent to it. The wall of the cattle shed was made of the same material as that of the dwelling.

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Plate 4.17 Houses of the most wealthy or influential villagers (Type 1 House). They were few in number. From left to right—Govind Bhai Tadvi (Adivasi research assistant), Bhavin Trivedi (research assistant) and the village participant who owned the house (rehabilitated village, Gujarat)

Sometimes the cattle were kept in open places bounded by twigs and woods collected from the forests. The frame of the house was made of mud-plastered wood (Das, 1982). The villagers were dependent on wood for the construction of their houses, which were collected illegally from the jungle or by bribing the forest officers. During monsoons due to heavy rainfall, many trees from forests were uprooted and floated downstream the River Narmada. The river joined a tributary that meandered through Vadgam. Villagers made wise use of these floating logs by collecting toward the construction or repair of houses. With the limited availability and restriction on the use of forest wood, sometimes the villagers waited for several years before they could build new houses or replace the wooden structures of existing houses. In the rehabilitated village, the houses have brick walls, with tin, titled or concrete roofs, and dirt or concrete floors. All the houses have a separate kitchen, bedrooms, and a living room. If a family consisted of married sons, separate kitchen and bedroom arrangements were built. Most houses have separate cattle sheds in open space. The storage

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Plate 4.18 Cattle sheds commonly constructed (in rehabilitated villages) to keep the house spaces organized (rehabilitated village, Gujarat)

spaces are made in the living room of all the houses, on poles as a tier. Some porticos have sitting arrangements. This is the area for the guests, but close relatives and women are allowed inside the house. The houses in Golagambdi can be grouped into three types. All the houses used a portion of the house plot to cultivate vegetables or food crops for household consumption, which were tended by the women of the households. Under type one, houses have mosaic floors or cement floors with brick walls (Plate 4.8). The walls of few houses in this category are plastered. The roof has tin sheds. But in few cases, the villagers use titles and hay to keep the inside cool in summer. A few houses had concrete roofs. These types of houses have decorated doors made of wood or tin. Every room had doors. This type of house belongs to the most affluent villagers. Some families who jointly cultivated their lands using advanced farm machineries could afford separate houses like this. Though houses were separately built, they wisely took house plots next to each other. Houses were constructed without leaving any buffer in between

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Fig. 4.2 Plan of Houses (Golagambdi rehabilitated village) (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006)

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them, thereby saving some area for growing vegetables, storing grains, and keeping cattle. Sometimes in the same house, divisions were made where each son had a room and a kitchen exclusively for them, but storage spaces and living rooms were commonly used. The main objective of joint family living was to save some of the home plot to cultivate food crops and vegetables. Accordingly, the families seemed to live as joint families, though they were highly nucleated inside. Several houses in this category have their own water pipelines and a raised platform outside the house for washing and cleaning. Those villagers who maintained type one house typically owned irrigation pumps and tractors, which they rented out. They also owned winnowers or grinders to grind grains for the rest of the village, the sale of which earned these houses extra income. The type two houses have brick walls, dirt floors, and tin shed with hay or tile roofs. The houses are compartmentalized, and all married couples have separate rooms and a kitchen. The living room is generally large. Although the main living space has a main door, in general, doors are not common in all rooms. These houses do not have a personal water supply. The third type of house has dirt walls, dirt floors, and tin roof. None of the rooms have doors or windows. The reason for this is that sometimes houses are made smaller and simpler with fewer rooms to save larger space for growing vegetables and food crops. These houses face the problem of becoming unbearably cold in winters and excessively warm in summers, and if the tin roofs have holes, they become wet in monsoons. The type two houses are more common than type one and three. From the structure of the houses, we can infer the economic conditions of the households. For instance, type one represents the affluent farmers, and type three houses represent the marginalized villagers. Specifically, women or major sons15 headed households. Those who do not receive land compensation or whose lands are not functional own type three houses. None of the houses have any bathrooms or toilets. The villagers I interviewed gave me the impression that early in the relocation process, the government R&R package did not provide them with basic requirements of sanitation. But in speaking with the government field officers and commissioner, I came to know that the villagers preferred not to have 15 The terms major son or eligible son are interchangeably used in R&R discourses. It represents all the adult males who were 18 years or older by 1984. All the adult sons were considered for 5 acres of compensatory land by the government; this amendment was made in the R&R policies over time.

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structures enclosing bathrooms and toilets. Instead, they wanted to optimize the space for cultivating food crops. Later on, villagers mentioned that they preferred open areas for defecation in the submerging villages. This was because the previous villages or submerging/submerged villages had large acreage and were sparsely populated. But in the present (relocated/rehabilitated) villages, due to lack of open spaces and decline in commonly used outdoor spaces, the need for sanitation structures has proven necessary and is urgent.

Tadvi Socio-Cultural Conditions Socio-cultural conditions, such as customs, norms, marriage, and family of the Tadvis at Vadgam and Golagambdi, are discussed in this section. Family Family is the smallest social unit in a village characterized by blood relations and property. The branching of a family starts with age and marriage resulting in division of property among sons and daughters. The eldest son or daughter of the family inherits agricultural lands from the father, which is further subdivided among younger sons and daughters. The Tadvis did not seem to be strictly patriarchal in the distribution of capital asset such as land, although marrying a daughter with dowry and marriage expenses shared by the bride’s father was common. Consequently, it was expected that sons would learn to farm cultivable lands as a head of a household. Prior to this division, the family remained an extended family, with sons and daughters living with their parents. Rehabilitation resulted in a gradual transformation in the lives of the villagers from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture. According to the R&R package, all eligible sons (also called major sons in R&R discourses and policies) who were 18 years of age by 1984 received five acres of cultivatable land. Besides cultivatable land, a major son was allocated a house plot (502 square meters), a pair of draught animals, and 4,500 rupees (Rs)16 for the construction of houses. In some cases, married members of the same family constructed different houses but mostly they lived in the same house, saving some land for cultivating vegetables. 16 The Indian currency is represented as Rs or rupees. Approximately Rs. 52–60 is equal to 1 Canadian Dollar.

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Marriage (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4) In Vadgam, the villagers received marriage alliance within five to ten miles radius across 38 villages (in Nandod, Naswadi, Dediapada, and Tilakwada taluka). The Tadvis married strictly within their caste or class communities. Tadvis did not intermarry with Bhils and Vasavas.17 A bilateral gift exchange downplayed traditional dowry. The bride’s father gives money and ornaments and pays for marriage expenditures. The groom’s family gives ornaments to the bride. In this sense, there was bilateral gift exchange between the bride’s and groom’s family. The influence of Hinduism was reflected on the vital presence of the priest. In the initial days of my ethnography, the relocated villagers stated that a dowry system was not prevalent in Tadvi marriages. They justified this arrangement by specifying the importance of female education, which would be supported monetarily by the dowry gifts. They also mentioned that gendered differentiation in household norms and activities is not applied differently to daughters and sons, though my personal observations did not support this claim. I questioned my respondent frequently and gradually gleaned that the marriage expenses for a villager’s daughter’s recent wedding were completely carried out by him. According to Chagan Bhai Tadvi, in the past, dowries were given in the form of cash, but at present various necessities are given along with cash. In addition to dowries, there is also an exchange of gifts between the bride’s and groom’s families. However, the bride’s father is responsible for the major marriage expenditure, paying for the transportation of the groom’s family and relatives, and other related expenses encountered during the wedding. Sometimes the bride’s father takes loans from rich farmers or money lenders or leases out his lands to meet these marriage expenditures. Marriages are mostly arranged through relatives or friends or networks in other villages. Currently, villagers are aware that daughters and sons should not be treated without differentiation. Although I found gendered construction of activities and roles, the villagers’ narratives deliberately concealed that male/female biases prevail in the community (Raghuram & Kofman,

17 In government records, the term Bhil is used as a general category to denote different Adivasi groups in the region, including Bhilalas and Vasavas. In the hills, however, those considered Bhils is a distinct Adivasi sub-group, different from other groups, such as Bhilalas and Vasavas.

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Fig. 4.3 Villagers searched for occupation or marriage alliances or preferred to relocate within this radius (Vadgam submerging village, Madhya Pradesh) (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006; Das, 1982)

2004; Werlhof, 2007; Women & Geography Study Group, 1997). Once, Chagan bhai had mentioned with pride that daughters are trained to gain competency in household chores and different kinds of gender-specific activities, as well as acquiring a basic education. However, young sons are made proficient with farm activities. The stereotype is that male villagers are mechanically skilled to work at farmlands with progression in age; hence, no training is required. If daughters are not trained with housework, it is disgraceful and dishonorable for the families, and is especially damaging to the father’s pride. The complex political economies of wedding parties involve cycles of gift giving and transfers of money from the groom’s as well as the bride’s side. However, what I gathered from the aforementioned stories is that

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Fig. 4.4 Plan of Golagambdi rehabilitated village (Source Chattopadhyay, 2006)

it is shameful for Tadvis to accept any wedding-related expenses from the groom’s family, or it is shameful for a father to not have the ability to bear their daughter’s weddings. Conspicuous consumption, status maintenance, availability of mostly manufactured goods, from cities, as well as the lack of alternative spheres of investment for remittances from city jobs were common. Many brief exchanges revealed that monetary compensation was exhausted toward expenses related to wedding, health care, and household to the exclusion of savings for the purchase of cultivable land or farm animals. Not just tribal weddings but caste Hindu weddings highlight the irrationality of this ritual practice. In light of the average monthly income of a family, it is typical for a wedding to consume almost a year’s income. Weddings bring to the foreground the contemporary forms of wealth accumulation and recount transnational political economies that depend on the housewifization of female members of a community (Mies, 1982). Mies (1982) defines this as: a process by which women are socially defined as housewives, dependent for their sustenance on the income of a husband, irrespective of whether they are de facto housewives or not. The social definition of women as

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housewives is the counterpart of the social definition of men as breadwinners, irrespective of their actual contribution to their family’s subsistence. (Mies, 1982, 180)

Prior to relocation from submerging villages, women had an income gained from collecting minor forest produce and cattle rearing. Relocation to rehabilitated villages came with the loss of forests, grazing lands, and commons, with the result that women in present villages do not enjoy the economic autonomy or household decision-making power of the past villages.

Tadvi Economic Conditions This section provides the economic conditions detailing changes in occupation, access to forest produce, common property resources, household asset, and consumption patterns of the villagers. Cattle (Plate 4.10) The economic conditions of the Indigenous people of the Adivasi belt were largely affected through displacement. At Vadgam, villagers owned large herds of cattle (100 or more goats, 20–30 cows and buffalos and uncountable hens). Due to relocation and lack of grazing lands in the resettled sites, villagers sold some of their domesticated animals and some simply died. Prior to relocation, women sold goats or hens if they required money for household expenses or small expenditures. The women sold cow’s milk for their minor household needs. Cattle primarily was a source of income for the women of the households. The rehabilitated sites offer fewer opportunities to provide a variety in the household diet, due to lack of grazing fields to sustain livestock. The narratives suggest that their income from cattle was substantially reduced because of displacement. According to Sunil Bhai Tadvi: We had approximately 40 to 50 goats in Vadgam. But during displacement some of the animals died. After change of place, we could not identify which plants were edible. Many of our goats consumed some poisonous plants and all of them died. Now we have one pair of oxen that came as a compensation from the government. Some of us opted to take money instead of the draught animals because some animals were not healthy.

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The market value of a pair of oxen was Rs 10,000, at that time of relocation. The predicament was, when they wanted to purchase the animal the market price was higher than what was offered by state compensation Anyhow, compensation packages also included five acres of cultivatable land and house plots. Since we received 10 acres of land in my father and grandfather’s name, we also received an extra two pairs of oxen. We sold one pair as we can plough the land collectively with a pair of oxen. (Sunil Bhai, male respondent, age-28, Interviewed by author 27th May 2004)

Sudden relocation adversely impacted their access, control, and knowledge over natural resources, eating habits, and livelihood systems. Besides, changing social and economic conditions, villagers’ consumption patterns and level of exposure to cities and towns are also changing. Economic conditions in Golagambdi depended on the villagers’ efficiency in cultivation of food and cash crops and on maintaining a stable income to purchase field inputs for cultivation. Many villagers who lived under better conditions in Vadgam have experienced deteriorating living conditions in Golagambdi because they were unsuccessful in adopting commercial farming methods. Cultivation was arduous for those who received infertile and uneven lands. Further, abnormal monsoons and repeated crop failures worsened the existing conditions. Everyday, I drank a cup of tea from a road-side shop owned by a host villager of Golagambdi. These eateries are called dhabas, across India. I saw many people smoking bidi, which is tobacco rolled in a specific kind of dry leaf, often home-made. But one could also buy bidis at a local store. Waiting under the giant tree for the bus or discussing issues with fellow villagers, I absorbed the garrulous tittle-tattle between the tea seller and my research assistant, Bhavin. They often cracked jokes about resettled villagers for drinking tea without milk, instead saving the cow’s milk to earn some money. They ridiculed the resettlers as stingy for not offering tea with milk to guests. My parents drank tea without milk and I was happy to drink tea without milk. Now, looking back, I feel these eating etiquettes cannot always be scientifically rationalized as healthy, but as a mark of privilege, a petite bourgeoisie habit; who can or cannot have a choice over food items or abundance and accessibility of food. Although, tea is not filled with calories without milk and is consumed in a variety of ways based on health needs or traditions or taste; according to the villagers, tea with milk was a sign of wealth. In addition, milk was becoming a rare commodity due to disappearing grazing lands and lack of milking cattle. In this way, enclosing commons infused many changes in the diets of the resettled

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villagers. I would hear villagers at the tea stall often joke about tea with milk as an urban preference. Even though many urbanities did not customarily drink milk with tea for health reasons, as a preference or to stay in shape. Consider veganism as an example. The logics of veganism rest upon a white-supremacist, middle class, wealthy, and neo-liberal versions of a moral self who can purchase their way to an ethical future. Likewise, calorie consciousness was an urban phenomenon, primarily for affluent urbanities who could access a wide variety of options fitting in their conceptualization of healthy versus unhealthy food.

Livelihoods (Plates 4.1, 4.10, 4.11, 4.12, 4.13 and 4.18) The main occupation of the Vadgam village was agriculture. Other livelihoods included cutting and selling forest wood, collecting minor forest produce, fishing, and cattle rearing. In Vadgam, agriculture remained primarily rain dependent as the people had no mechanisms with which to irrigate agricultural fields. Cropping patterns were divided in two cycles. Villagers either practiced mono cropping or double cropping. The soil was gravelly, so crops grown at Vadgam were coarse crops such as jowar and bajra, and pulses such as urad and tuvar. The first cropping cycle lasted from 120 to 135 days during monsoons. The second cycle was the winter crop grown on better plots along the riverbanks and valleys. The acreage dedicated to cotton and groundnut cultivation was low. According to the farmers, growing cotton was unpredictable, as it required heavy investment with uncertain returns. Only a few wealthy farmers with large holdings cultivated cotton. Three major types of land were cultivated in the village. The first type of land was owned or inherited by the villager. The second type of land was government land cultivated by paying revenue. The third type was forestland under the jurisdiction of the forest department. Villagers had no ownership on these lands but cultivated them illegally and extensively. Cultivation of these lands was frequent and enabled by bribing the forest officers. Farming is different at Golagambdi, as every male older than 18 years of age (by 1984) at the time when compensated land was distributed received five acres of cultivatable land. All the villagers practiced agriculture. Land was efficiently managed to grow cash crops, while food crops were grown in house plots and in fringe areas of main cultivable lands.

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Some families collectively cultivated lands to gain higher crop productivity. Some resettlers who received a primary education obtained government jobs at the R&R offices. These people hoped to improve their lives through a second income from city jobs in addition to cultivating lands. This transition was a long time in coming as the villagers were struggling due to shrinking livelihoods. Sunil, for example, has a temporary job in the city, and he also cultivates his father’s and grandfather’s land. Sunil Bhai Tadvi and his younger brother were younger than 18 years of age when land compensation was given. He stated: According to the promises made by the government, I should receive a permanent government job but I did not receive any. I have secondary education, but I work in a temporary job, as a home guard in a private organization. I work there for five days a week but my salary is low though the job is difficult and time consuming. (Sunil Bhai Tadvi, male respondent, age-28, interviewed by author 2nd June 2004)

Some villagers who were educated to the primary level received clerical jobs, but many village youths who completed undergraduate and postgraduate educations in later years did not receive any jobs. Because these policies were not made clear to the oustees, those who were educated developed expectations to receive government jobs despite these details being unclear regarding post-education employment as a compensation benefit or criteria. Crops Grown At Vadgam, the different food crops cultivated were jowar (Sorghum bicolor), bajri (Pennisetum typhoides), gahum (wheat), makhai (maize), dangar (inferior rice, rice), and cash crops like kapas (cotton) and makfali (groundnut). The two pulses commonly grown were tuvar (Arhar) and urad (Phaseolus mungo). Different types of vegetables were also grown to supplement their diet. Food crops were mostly grown for consumption and very little was left as surplus. Very few villagers grew cotton and groundnut as cash crops (see Chattopadhyay, 2014). Similar crops are grown at Golagambdi, but they produce substantial amounts of marketable surplus. The stems of cotton, wheat, jowar, and bajri are used as firewood, or to make fences around the houses or to

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make roofs of houses. But villagers cultivate more cotton and groundnuts to earn cash. Tuvar, rice, wheat, bajri, and jowar are grown for daily consumption but always some marketable surplus is hoarded. Vegetables and food crops that are cultivated in house plots are used entirely for household consumption (see earlier sections). A year before my surveys, the villagers had experienced crop failure due to heavy rainfall and fungal disease. Because all of them grew coarser and dry crops, less water was required for cultivation. Therefore, heavy downpours damaged the crops. According to one villager in Golagambdi: In last year’s rain tuvar and then jowar was spoiled. The crop productivity was largely affected by rain and disease. As these crops need rain while sowing, too heavy rain can spoil the crop as it grows. I used fertilizers and pesticides but did not have the proper know-how, therefore, it made no difference in the crop productivity. Between the major crops we cultivate vegetables. We also grow small trees and dry plants. The branches of these trees are used as cooking fuel, making fences and thatching roofs. (Kuber bhai, male respondent, age-37, interviewed by author, 14th May 2004)

In Golagambdi, few cultivators own tractors, winnowers, and water pumps. The rest of the villagers hire these machines from them. The villagers are still learning the application of fertilizers, pesticides, and high yielding varieties of seeds. Though the villagers are well connected with markets and cities and benefit from high agricultural returns, they are anxious about the increasing expenditures. The usual response to a crisis is to blame the government and displacement as the cause of their suffering. Forest Produce At Vadgam, the villagers grew different kinds of vegetables like divela, arinda, badri, bhinda (Abelmoschus esculentus), bunti (Echinochloa crus), chowli (Vigna unguiculata), kodra (Paspalum scrobiculatum), and dhudi (water goard) in the forest rim areas and riverbanks. Forest Products Forest products were of various types of leaves like timbru ka pan, asitra, gundar, kanka pan, sag ka pan, and achidraka pan used for making plates, roof, and homeopathic stimulants. The villagers rolled one type of leaf to make local cigarettes called bidi. Some leaves were chewed like betel leaf. Different kinds of woods like bamboo and mahuda were grown for

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making house walls, fences, and frames. They pressed mahuda bark for oil. Other forest products were honey and grass. Previously, the villagers earned Rs. 10–15 every day from forest produce. The importance of forests, the villagers’ access to the forest, and their income from forest produce waned substantially with displacement. Consumption Patterns In Vadgam, all villagers had large herds of goats and hens, which they consumed as meat. Villagers purchased ground wheat flour from shops. The dependence on readymade flour also reflected their exposure to cities. Apart from these minor alterations, they largely remained dependent on the forests and the river for food. They supplemented their diets with various vegetables and plants grown in the forests’ peripheral areas, with fish from river and with meat and milk from cattle to enrich their diets. In Golagambdi, the number of cattle has declined. Non-Bhagats have to purchase meat and fish from markets, and hence, consumption of these items is rare. Most of the village consumes tea, sugar, cooking oil, and spices, such as turmeric and chilly powder for preparing food. At Golagambdi, this dependence on readymade food and spices increased the consistent linkages with markets and cities.

Tadvi Civic Amenities The transportation facilities are better at Golagambdi than at Vadgam. Vadgam did not have any motorable roads with the exception of a seasonably passable dirt road from the village to the dam-site. At Golagambdi, buses ran to cities, towns, and markets (Sankheda, Borili, Daboi, Bhaderpur, and Vadodra) at regular intervals, from morning till evening. The entire village is lit with streetlights and water pumps are placed at three points within the village. The village has a school, a playground, and a community center. Some villages have primary health centers for health check-ups. Mobile vans visit the village twice a week for health check-up. However, according to a villager in Golagambdi: The mobile vans do not provide proper check-ups, so we go to city hospitals, but it is time consuming. Hence, I prefer going to the private hospitals, but we have to spend some money on the doctor’s fees and medicine. All together, we need to pay Rs.100 or more based on the

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aliment. If we must go to the nearest city (Vadodra), the expenditure is higher and a whole day is spent in visiting the doctor and traveling to the city. If we go to the towns (Dabhoi and Bhaderpur) the transportation cost is Rs.10 in addition to the doctor’s fees. Moreover, we spent half a day going to towns for medical supplies or health check-ups. (A village lady, age-65, Interview by author, 27th June 2004)

Tadvis Transformations Vadgam had more open spaces where houses were widely distributed, and they had forests to provide variety in the food consumed. The Tadvis of Vadgam were gradually exposed to the challenges of urban lifestyles as a dam-site village. The dam-site villages exposed the Tadvis to the adverse affects of the dam and compensation packages through the government officials and action groups, namely dependence on commercial products. Changes in their preferences and living conditions were taking place in a subtle manner. They started using spices and cooking oil for making food, stitching dresses in towns, desired primary and higher education, aspired to government jobs, and learned new techniques for increasing crop productivity. Vadgam was also a site of negotiation as resistance against the SSP spread notions of claims for the right to live, and a right to livelihood and to justice. Villagers participated in series of resistance movements in collaboration with the NGOs against the government for better R&R policies. On initial viewing from an outsider’s perspective, Golagambdi looks like a planned and generic landscape. Sadly, nature-culture linkages are fading among people living there. Civic amenities are provided but not maintained, and villagers are not trained to mend utilities that are becoming dysfunctional. For example, in many villages, the drinking water pumps are unusable, and village women have to walk for three to five kilometers to fetch drinking water from neighboring villages. Some school buildings are constructed, but they have very few teachers to manage large groups of students. Other schools have closed down for shortage of students or irregularity in attendance. Mobile health vans are visiting twice a week, but once R&R is complete, they will be discontinued. In addition, even though the mobile health vans are available, people prefer the more expensive city hospitals, due to the mobile health service’s inefficiency in providing proper health care. In many cases, lands are allotted, but they are infertile. Within the initial 10 years of

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displacement, villagers have so many more problems. It is difficult to assert how conditions will change over several decades. Consequently, the present Tadvi generation no longer retains their socio-cultural uniqueness of the traditional Tadvi communities. The present generation of Tadvis adapt mainstream urban culture, and what follows is a rapid erosion of the previous socio-cultural elements. To understand their ways of living, consumption patterns, and cultural backgrounds, we must delve into various discourses and manuscripts, but also hear from the elders to capture a glimpse of their socio-cultural originality and economic challenges.

References Ahmad, R. (2002, May 18). Gujarat violence: Meaning and implications. Economic and Political Weekly. Aurora, G. S. (1972). Tribe-caste-class encounters: Some aspects of folk-urban relations in Alirajpur Tehsil. Administrative Staff College. Baviskar, A. (1995). In the Belly of the River: Tribal conflicts over development in the Narmada Valley. Oxford University Press. Chattopadhyay, S (2006). Involuntary migration and the mechanisms of rehabilitation: The discourses of development in Sardar Sarovar, India (PhD Dissertation). Kent State University. Chattopadhyay, S. (2014). Post colonial development state, appropriation of nature, and social transformation of ousted adivasis in the Narmada valley. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 25(4), 1–20. Das, B. (1982). Studies on rehabilitation of submerging villages. Vadgam. Centre for Social Studies. Desai, A. R. (1979). Peasant struggles in India. Delhi. Devy, G. (2002, May). Tribal voice and violence in seminar 513 (pp. 39–48). Komi Ramkhang. Dhagamwar, V., Thukral, E. G., & Singh, M. (1995). The Sardar Sarovar project: A study in sustainable development. In W. Fisher (Ed.), Towards sustainable development: Struggling over India’s Narmada River (pp. 265–319). M.E. Sharpe. Dwivedi, R. (1999). Displacement risks and resistance: Local perceptions and actions in the Sardar Sarovar. Development and Change, 30(1), 43–78. Elwin, V. (1964). The tribal world of Verrier Elwin: An autobiography. Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (1959 [1965]). A dying colonialism (H. Haakon Chevalier, Trans.). Grove Press.

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Gadgil, M., & Guha, R. (1992). The fissured land: An ecological history of India. Oxford University Press. Guha, R. (1994). Fighting for the forest: State forestry and social change in Tribal India. In O. Mendelsohn & U. Baxi (Ed.), The rights of subordinated. Oxford University Press. Guha, R., & Martínez-Alier, J. (1997). Varieties of environmentalism: Essays North and South. Earthscan. Hardiman, D. (1987). The coming of the Devi: Adivasi assertion in western India. Oxford University Press. Hardiman, D. (1996). Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and usurers in western India. Oxford University Press. Heesterman, J. C. (1985). The inner conflict of tradition essays in Indian ritual, kingship, and society. University of Chicago Press. Joshi, V. (1983). Rehabilitation of submerging villages—General report. South Gujarat University. Joshi, V. (1991). Rehabilitation—A promise to keep: A case of SSP. The Tax Publications. Joshi, V. (2000). Rehabilitation is possible: The Sardar Sarovar Narmada project. Navprabhat Printing Press. Lobo, L. (2002). Adivasis, hindutva and post-godhra riots in Gujarat. Economic and Political Weekly, 37 (48), 4844–4849. Mies, M. (1982). Lace makers of Narsapur: Indian housewives produce for the world market. Zed Books. Raghuram, P., & Kofman, E. (Ed.). (2004). Out of Asia: skilling, re-skilling and deskilling. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (2), 95–100. Ramanathan, U. (1996). Displacement and law. International environmental law research centre. International Environmental House. Scott, J. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. Yale University Press. Setu. (1999). The new economic policy and adivasi communities in India with special reference to Gujarat and Maharashtra’ in development, equity and justice. Minority Rights Group. Shiva, V. (1988). Staying alive: Women, ecology and survival in India. Kali for Women. Skaria, A. (1997). Women, witchcraft and gratuitous violence in colonial western India. Past and Present, 1555, 109–141. Werlhof, C. V. (2007). F.O. Wolf and TINA. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 18(2), 126–131. Women and Geography Study Group. (1997). Feminist geographies: Explorations in diversity and difference. Longman.

CHAPTER 5

Negotiating Development: At the Interface of Power and Resistance

Abstract This chapter is on power and resistance centering around the Sardar Sarovar project (SSP). Therefore, the chapter details resistance in the valley as it manifested in three levels: (1) the government domain, (2) the affected peoples’ domain (pre- and post-rehabilitation), and (3) the action groups’ domain. The government domain argues the ability of the state to provide better rehabilitation through the implementation of sustainable (people-centric) R&R policy. On the contrary, the affected people’s and action groups’ domains demonstrate the inability of the state to provide the former. The economic marginalization created by the SSP was further aggravated by the unevenness in compensation packages and ad hoc implementation of the resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) policies. Keywords Power · Resistance · Tactics · Strategies · Narmada Bachao Andolan · Social Movements

In this chapter, I draw from development discourses and discourses on power and movements-from-below (de Certeau, 1988; Foucault, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1997; Gramsci, 1971; Scott, 1990). Traditionally, development was conceptualized as a unidirectional social and environmental evolution, an irreversible progress, and affirmation of the centralized © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4_5

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nation-state’s authority, which produced and conditioned the recipients of development (Escobar, 1995; Gupta, 1998; Ludden, 1992). In the postindependence era, the Indian agrarian and environmental history closely followed the lines of the colonial apparatus, afflicting social and natural landscapes (Agarwal & Sivaramakrishnan, 2000; Arnold & Guha, 1995; Gadgil & Guha, 1992). The most prominent of these was the Green Revolution beginning in the 1950s, involving the intensification of Indian agriculture through high yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization (Anderson et al., 1982; Gupta, 1998). If all the dams constructed along the Narmada River are considered, the total number of people evicted and/or impacted by dispossession, job loss, land loss, and asset loss by submergence or direct requisition of village commons by the state for the dam or other ancillary projects add up to 15 million (Roy, 1999). Living in the “times of exploitation” and “erasure”, elimination of the native, locals, and Indigenous communities is left to fend for themselves and to resist eradication (Routledge, 2003, 254). State hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) is linked to repression (i.e., “political society” or a state apparatus) and consent (i.e., “civil society” or “ensemble of organisms commonly called private”). Hegemony is exercised by the dominant on the subservient groups and direct domination by the state and judiciary—it’s a constellation of power whose scales of operation and application are socially and historically specific. Crehan’s (2002, 104) description of hegemony demonstrates, in the absence of regulations by the judicial system, the relationship between power, coercion, and oppression becomes an “accommodation to erase opposition, (through which) the state must repress dissent”. Random arrests, detention, beating, assault, torture, humiliation, and physical and verbal abuse have been used by the state as tools to muzzle protesters from dam-impacted villagers and their non-governmental alliances (Routledge, 2003, 253). Such interventions have been criticized for disrupting social relations deepening political stratification (Shiva, 1988). Contemporary critical thought has represented wide theoretical and methodological priorities while analyzing social construction of relations and complex spatial connections between the gendered spatial actors (Flobre, 1988; Floro, 1991; Mohanty, 1991; Smart, 2002; Tyner, 2004). The enactment of power by various institutions upon ordinary people can be garnered by observing everyday lives of Indigenous people and by participating in and listening to debates and discussions of Adivasi villagers (Gibson-Graham, 2000; Lawson, 2000; McDowell, 1999; Silvey, 2004; Tyner, 1994, 2004; Yapa, 1999).

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The Making of Migrant Oustees The recent controversy of the Narmada valley projects dominates the field of national environmental movements as the most contentious waterbased conflicts in India. For the past few decades, there have been a variety of conflicts over forest resources in India, leading to a celebrated platform of burgeoning forest conservation movements. The Chipko (hug the trees) movement came into being in April 1973 and was staged throughout the Gharwal Himalaya to impede the commercial felling of trees. The protests were led by the hill peasantry and geared toward state forest policies that denied the local people access to fodder, fuel, and food from forests. In Chipko’s footsteps, a trail of peasant retaliations in the Himalayan foothills drew inspiration from Gandhian non-violent strategies and left-wing activists. These movements unlocked a powerful arena of action against the state commercial forestry practices for violation of customary rights to forest access, with a focus on a comprehensive array of issues relating to the Indian forest policy and the environment debate as a whole (Guha, 1989). The Indian environmental debate has now been saturated by controversies around large-scale development projects, particularly dams.1 The first citizens report2 covered the “women of Chamoli”, who were originators of the Chipko movement, while the second was dedicated to the “dam-displaced people of India”. Throughout the 1980s and beyond, different river valley projects, from Tehri in the north to Silent Valley in the south, Koel Karo in the east to Sardar Sarovar in the west, have been the subject of vitriolic debates. The opponents of multipurpose river valley projects have operated on several flanks, spanning cost-benefit ratios derived by the government to validate large dams, to the high prevalence of water-based logging. Alterations to the river ecologies, a significant rise of water borne diseases, invariably overrated benefits and underrated costs, and the large-scale submergence of forests and wildlife have been offered as instances of the unacceptable costs of the construction of large dams (CSE, 1985; Kalpraviska, 1998; Pranjype, 1990) and for a global survey and critique.

1 See the first two citizens’ reports on the state of India’s environment, CSE (1985). 2 The Citizen’s Reports were published by Center for Science and Environment (CSE),

which is a not-for-profit organization. CSE is known for public interest research and advocacy on environment and development in India.

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There is a robust discourse in India that challenges the conventional wisdom of Western and especially American conceptualization of environmentalism and understanding of ecological conservation and preservation, which is argued as having a flavor of upper middle-class notions rather than comprehensions of the marginalized and minoritized peoples. Poor countries and poor people conceptualize and understand their relations with the environment differently than those in more privileged positions (Thurow, 1980, 104–105). Widespread environmentalism of the affluent North is “a natural product of a rising real standard of living. We have simply reached the point where, for many Americans, the next item on their acquisitive agenda is a cleaner environment. If they achieve it, it will make all of the other goods and services (boats, summer homes, and so forth) more enjoyable” (Thurow, 1980, 104–105). In this sense, popular environmentalism is “not a throwback to the primitive, but an integral part of the modern standard of living as people sought to add new “amenity” and “aesthetic” goals and desires to their earlier preoccupation with necessities and conveniences” (Hays, 1987, 21). Greenness is the definitive bonus of a consumer society that has attained economic prosperity (Agarwal, 1986). Historically, American Environmentalism is a “full stomach phenomenon”—a direct consequence of economic prosperity through which “wilderness areas and clean air” appear to be treasured as basic material needs that have been satisfied (Nash, 1982). Here, the paradigm shift from First World environmentalism to Third World environmentalism marks the environmental histories of two democracies, with one comfortably positioned in a post-industrial economy, while the other struggles forward in an early industrial agrarian economy that is heavily reliant on large development projects (e.g., dams) for irrigation and subsidiary developments. In the latter, the history of colonial exploitation and industrialization in the post-independent phase has led to resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, and massive dispossession of populations who were directly dependent on natural resources. These discussions shape or lead to the construction of a productive concept Environmentalism of the poor. Environmentalism of the poor describes communities whose basic needs stem from natural resources which are no longer available to them due to preservation, conservation, or statecorporate appropriation; whereas the environmentalism followed by the affluent refers to people who have everything they need and can therefore require clean functional environments as an embellishment to their basic needs.

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In the early 1960s, two decades after independence, when Pandit Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, laid the foundation stone of SSP, the only message conveyed to the Indigenous people was that the dam would be built, and they would “have to” relocate to make way for the dam. The findings of a 1986 study by the non-government organization Multiple Action Research Group (MARG) (operating at the time in 26 Adivasi villages in Madhya Pradesh [MP]) revealed that no prior notice of subsequent dislocation was provided to any of the villages slated for relocation by the state of MP. However, under Section 4 and 6 of the Land Acquisition Act (1894), the people had the right to know about their potential dislocation. Although notices were issued unsystematically to few farmers in random villages (following section 9), these notices were neither read nor explained to them, so those who could not read remained uninformed about their rights or ill-informed of the proposed hydro project and their imminent displacement. In most villages, the initial information about the dam came from the Central Water Commission’s personnel, who marked the planned reservoir’s water level while surveying the villages. Information also traveled from indiscriminate sources including wandering sadhus (hermits). In no documented case did the district authorities in MP inform the future oustees about the dam or their imminent dispossession. Randomly, in only nine or ten of hundreds of villages to be submerged, the government officials held meetings on probable displacement (MARG, 1986, 1–2). In the land acquisition notices distributed among the landowners, entitlements were not clearly described, the SSP administrative setup for R&R was not organized, and villagers were not informed of substantial losses due to submergence. There was a great degree of indifference and casualness in compensating or informing the villagers of dislocation risks. MP administration firmly believed that, like all major irrigation schemes in Gujarat and elsewhere in India, the Indigenous people in the footprint of the SSP would simply have to move, accepting whatever compensation was offered by the government. For example, Patel (1995a) stated that a minister in charge of the SSP argued that “the government does not have to move a finger to dislocate the affected communities, as they will run out of their homes and lands like rodents from cracks and crevices when the water level rises”. According to village Elder, Sana bhai:

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Now we know the legal tactics and the market-driven norms. But during the time of displacement, we felt helpless for not knowing the mechanisms of dislocation and resettlement. We did not have answers to so many questions, like the impacts of displacement, eligibility of compensation, location of resettled sites to name a few. The fear of displacement made us panic-stricken. We were worried over future uncertainties. (Sana Bhai, male respondent, age 38, Suryatalav, Interviewed by author, June 19th, 2004)

The dam-displaced oustees were subjected to the disciplinary control of power (McDowell, 1999) in various ways. Not until the surveyors started locating the boundary stones of the reservoir did the affected people know about the project and the future inundation of their lands and homes. At a later stage, the villagers were told about the anticipated displacement, but there was no discussion of the implications. The government’s miscommunication and coercive relocation is a strategy of imposing discipline, a technique, and a form of power practiced by the state or other dominant institutions to control the subordinated (Foucault, 1982, 212). In this way, the effect of power on the forced migrants of SSP constructs a particular discourse (Foucault, 1980, 98). The Indigenous concept of land as a space consisting of valuable resources with both human and non-human species existing in a social network did not always function inside of the concept of capital and, as such, was devalued, depoliticized, and naturalized by the state and R&R norms. The following depictions of land exploitation exhibit a struggle against the reproduction of views that bypass relationships of power in a capitalist system. These relationships exist in the structural conditions of exploitation perpetuated by colonialism and the master-slave, employeeworker, and colonized-colonizer dichotomies. Through the settler lens, land is a commodity to control, own, and exploit for the colonizer’s benefit. Both the land and the people living there are objectified—a relationship in which both the land and the Indigenous people are objectified as commodities (Wolfe, 2006). Often non-commodified norms are embedded in kingship and/or community relations that do not differentiate private from public property, but instead hold property in common wherein land use is protected by norms practiced by community members. The appropriation of these lands by dams, or other development projects (e.g., forest reserves, parks, nature trails), has ruptured existing community relations with the land. These spaces are often used as a commodified

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space for tourism but seldom open for human survival and well-being (Igoe, 2004). According to Lefebvre (1991), abstract spaces are the objectification of space by the state, or the corporate entity often empties or removes the subjective cultural meanings, symbolic importance, and land-based experiences of people who have once lived on those spaces. Abstractions to create capital from these spaces “erase rights of particular communities and erase difference and diversity in the interests and the propagation of the same. These abstractions are encoded with hegemonic geopolitics and geoeconomics—perpetrated by the agents of state and globalization” (Routledge, 2003, 253). The people and the environment of the valley were thus considered expendable. The power of the sovereign “to take life” or “to let live” with governmentality and bureaucratic management enacts “the power” “to make live” or “to let die”. Butler, following Foucault (1988), emphasizes that governmentality in “modern states” or “global regimes acts” as an “extra-legal sphere”—“an art of managing things and persons concerned with the tactics nor laws”—that then “depends on the question of sovereignty” “no longer predominates the field of power” (Butler 2006, 96, 94). Governmentality acts in the name of sovereignty in that it exceeds at developing a “lawless sovereignty” of its own application of power (Butler, 2006, 96). Following the Roman legal origins of Western law links sovereignty to power, designating subjects of law as homo sacer 3 and thereby positions the sacred man/subjects of law as sacrificial beings who “enter the state of exception”, and who can be killed without sacrifice. In this way, creating a permanent space for “bare life” in turn creates a “materialization of the state of exception” and “the rule”. Agamben does not link colonialism with biopower4 but other scholarly works have established the link between past and present continuities of colonialism (through globalization and the expansion of the Empire) with biopower. As argued by Rosa Luxemburg (needs a citation source), through contemporary modes of biopower, the colonial returns as an omni-present geopolitical 3 Agamben’s (1998) homo sacer is the sacred man or the accursed man. They are the persons who can be banned or may be killed as a ritual. They are so sacred that they remain outside the law or are above the law. 4 Literally, biopower means having control over bodies through an explosion of a diversity of techniques so bodies can be subjugated and disciplined. Biopower refers to disciplinary societies where regulatory containment of populations is possible.

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phenomenon (Razack, 2007; Thobani, 2007). Consider settler colonialism or neo-colonial mechanisms through economics of conquest; the conquest and continued occupation of various locations positions the local or Indigenous people in a “space of exception”, troubling the integrity of settlers as representatives of Western law (Rifkin, 2009). Settler colonialism has continued, effecting not only Indigenous people and their lands, but also all political, economic, and cultural processes that those settler societies touch (Morensen, 2011, 53, my emphasis). Through appropriation, dispossession, and accumulation, the Indian state is creating abstract space/s that are desacralizing places. While through submergence, the state is violently despoiling water quality and radically separating people from land, resources, and species. The process is concurrently objectifying and commodifying all human and non-human species of the valley. In this way, the relocated villagers are held in space/s of exception, where their (bare) lives are open to elimination and replacement by rule (Morgesen, 2011, 65). Discourses of power legitimizes: (1) the government goals, (2) R&R efforts, (3) resistance discourses, and (4) NGOs’ challenges. Common interest and consciousness of affected village people and NGOs in the Narmada valley formed a highly instrumental and nonviolent conflict with the government. Nonviolence is a prominent tactic which was adopted by the people when either the state interests and dislocation goals or the details on the compensation package were not articulated. At the later stage of SSP, peoples’ movements forced the state to clarify the policies and to make substantial changes in the compensation packages. As interests were clarified, resistance was increasingly replaced by lesser forms of resistance which took on the role of social negotiation. Social negotiation is an exercise of power and more subtle form of resistance by Indigenous people and NGOs (Cresswell, 1996), reinforcing their movements against the overt power of the state. The resistance of Indigenous groups against the state apparatus displays the art of discourse as a tactic or strategy of power. The following incident illustrates this explanation. In the middle of the day, when most men were away in the fields, on the pretext of holding a meeting, government officials assembled all village women in one house while posting guards outside preventing the women from leaving the house. One woman sneaked out and she spied on the surveyors measuring the level of submergence in their villages. She ran to snatch the tapes from the surveyors. At this, the police forced her back into the house with their lathis

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(baton), which led to trampling a young girl. Several women were beaten and bruised. However, the villagers succeeded in preventing the survey from being completed that day (Baviskar 1995, 111–113). The story argues the use of state punitive pressure to discipline its subjects (Mills, 1997, 43) as state disciplinary strategies consist of pressure tactics that include “time-keeping, self-control over one’s posture and bodily functions, concentration, sublimation of immediate desires, and emotions”. The state’s punitive discipline controls its subjects in a manner that is internalized by individuals. This incident is one of the many examples of discipline enforced on the people slated for dislocation—a power holder’s control mechanism that is strategically used by the dominant (government) toward the subservient (villagers). In another narrative, the same village woman mentioned that she came to know about a village that was submerged due to dammed precipitation. She explained that, although she is suspicious of the village being completely inundated, she worries that, without any plans of relocation, the people might be forced to climb up the hills while they helplessly watch their village being engulfed by the reservoir (Baviskar, 1995). So, the specter of submergence, of having to rebuild lives, loomed large. Another narrative of power used by the state can be gathered from following the phases of resettlement and its impact in creating villagers’ income instability. In the late 1870s to early 1890s, a several groups of villagers were displaced with varying minimal monetary compensation. In a few years, the relocated villagers spent their compensation funds on comestibles and household expenditures, maintenance of houses, marriage, health care, and the like. The R&R policy did not provide cultivatable lands to those who could not show land titles, and thus, many of the relocated villagers were left without any stable income source and could not establish any kind of stability beyond the first few years following compensation. Most of them became landless laborers in cities or contributed to the existing begging population. Those relocated villagers who encroached on government lands or who cultivated or used common lands were addressed by the state as encroachers and “thieves”, the most overt use of defamatory labels (Patel, 1995a, b). These innocuous forms of dominance lasted for generations. The lack of land titles favored the government in not providing compensation to all Adivasi displacees. Even legitimate landowners were deprived of land entitlement if their names were not on government records. The R&R policy was deeply repressive and excluded the majority of Indigenous

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families from having a stable source of income, while being socially stigmatized and deprived from their right to life with dignity. Resistance to the SSP from the subordinate segments of the society threw into question the legitimacy of resource distribution. Counter struggles symbolized a radical critique to the process and means in which projects were justified as developmental (GOI, 1994; World Bank, 1994).

Creation of Risks By 1987, the Gujarat government substantially revised the compensation package for landless laborers, making them eligible for two hectares of irrigated land, house plot, and a pair of draught animals. As with landed households, adult major sons were treated as separate families, so they were also compensated. The Maharashtra government modified the policy five years later; in 1992, they provided land compensation of one hectare for every male member and unmarried daughters of a household who were 18 years of age. Protests forced the state to include the project affected people who were labeled as encroachers. MP government showed reluctance to adopt policy modifications. Instead, the state of MP negotiated a reduction in the dam height, in order to reduce the displacement-related costs. The dam height was a major bone of contention between the states of Gujarat and MP. Although the height of the dam as it was designed by Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal (NWDT) was non-negotiable, the three riparian states and NGOs argued on the height anticipating losses and gains (see FMG, 1994; Shah, 1994 for overview of contention over dam height). For example, Gujarat wanted an increase in the height predicting the profits from the dam. The state discourse leaned toward the benefits of affluent farmers, while MP government argued for lower height fearing the submergence losses. In 1992, the independent review mission (IRM) was set up by the WB to evaluate resettlement and environmental aspects of the SSP, resulting in the suggestion of remedial measures. The IRM noted serious policy deficiencies, planning and implementation failures, and unavailability of data on the types of losses due to submergence. Analyzing these policy deficiencies, the World Bank withdrew funding and ceased involvement with the project until these problems were addressed (Appa, 1992; FMG, 1994). From this background of policy formation, interstate disputes, and

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WB withdrawal, I analyze the production of risks, uncertainties, negotiations, and contestation. Initially, it was difficult for me to detect the intricate web of power relations operating in the valley. For instance, in the initial stages of resettlement, less monetary compensation was offered leading to marginalization of resettled communities through negligence in calculating their future needs. During the second stage of resettlement, monetary compensation was higher, but this discrepancy created animosity between early and later recipients of compensation (Das, 1982). In both the phases, some villages were displaced for construction of a township, roads, and a helipad for the prime minister’s visit to the valley (Ramanathan, 1996). The Adivasis developed a deep-seated revulsion to all developmental interventions which disturbed their lifestyles. With the assistance of several NGOs, the people learned the loopholes and the shortcomings of the policy. Although residential compensation was offered to all oustees, land compensation was only provided if the affected people could prove legal land holding status. Thereafter, those, who could not provide land ownership papers or those who cultivated common lands, faced a threat of impoverishment. Finally, after years of protests, land compensation was given to all displaced villagers and major sons, although unevenness in the distribution of the compensation continued. Specifically, the village leaders and those who held influential positions in submerging villages received house plots at opportune locations with various amenities, such as faucets with running water, cultivatable land, roads, schools, and clinics. But marginal farmers, encroachers, or landless laborers faced challenges in obtaining cultivatable lands and access to amenities. The challenges varied from receiving infertile lands as compensation. Some villagers detailed about receiving land allotments through which mud roads were constructed, While some people were frustrated as parts of their cultivable lands being unusable due to unevenness in the topography; or for being unfertile or flood-prone during monsoons. More difficulties arose when women headed households or when major sons were overlooked and did not receive land compensation. These challenges and discrepancies created conflicts and unhealthy communal relations among the villagers and further stressed household relations. Many times, the compensation obtained by the people were of inferior quality or undulating which led to frustration and often to fatigue and alcoholism. I intentionally asked the affected people who they blamed for their fragile economic conditions and was repeatedly told that they held the government responsible for the deterioration of their social and

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economic status. When I posed similar questions to the NGOs, their responses emphasized the far-reaching dis-equilibrium created through dislocation. By comparison, when asked, the state R&R officers always painted a rosy picture of rehabilitation gains. The NGO and government institutions held differing places of power and framed their discourses in ways that suited their interests and motives, and which provided me with two contrasting explanations. Other researchers have noted that discourses constructed by movement activists and the government officials tend to highlight complex and opposing sets of practices focused on their respective aims, objectives, and justifications for or against the SSP, with statements that projected each other’s incompetency and irrationalities (Mills, 1997). The boundaries of these discourses were fluid, changing to contest new discourses as they surfaced in the political landscape (Gee, 1989, 21–23). In the following sections, I discuss how the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) movement’s strategies evolved as action groups shifted from demands for better rehabilitation to a “no-dam” stance. This change in the severity of their agendas clearly displayed their goal for the villagers’ struggles in the valley to persist and thereby sustain the existence of their role in the resistance. Resistance identity is generated by social actors through protest tactics based on the objectives behind counter struggles and movement ideologies infused in the institutions of the society. For the NBA, counter-discourses of development were articulated through a variety of movement tactics, including (1) building alliances locally, nationally, and globally with partner organizations, (2) organizing, in situ, nationally and around the world, (3) uniting disparate groups (large and influential land owners like the Patridars and Adivasi), (4) building a sense of community within a meeting or a crowd, (5) carefully selecting places of protest locations and word choice for slogans and talking points at meetings, (6) implementing Gandhian methods of direct action and nonviolent conflict, (7) highlighting the symbolic importance of the valley, the commons, and the environment, (8) re-creating local development opportunities for the people of the valley, and most importantly, (9) protesting the politics that dishonored the Indigenous communities in India.

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Movements from Below---Narmada Bachao Andolan The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) movement was initially formed in 1978 in Nimar (“the plains”), as the Nimar Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save Nimar), and was renamed to reflect a focus on the Narmada valley during the SSP. Soon after, the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award (a.k.a. NWDT) had formulated its guidelines, Arjun Singh, leader of Congress (I), mobilized the people of Nimar to reclaim assets lost during SSP relocation and formed the NBA. Singh’s involvement in the NBA was seen as part of his efforts to win the elections. Within that year, Singh and the Janata Party came to power in central India and in MP. He was supported by the wealthy merchants and agriculturalists of Nimar. Soon after he won the elections in 1979, Singh promptly abandoned the movement (Baviskar, 1995) and any further efforts to resist the dam. In 1985, Medha Patkar, a social scientist at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences (Mumbai), made her second attempt to organize and mobilize the people valley against the sweeping displacement following the construction of the SSP on the Narmada. Initially, however, Patkar’s reorganized Andolan (Movement) did not challenge the overall validity of the SSP. Instead, she organized with the people to demand adequate rehabilitation, i.e., displacement with compensation (ARCH-Vahini, Rajpipla Social Service Society and Center for Social Studies in Gujarat) (CSE, 1985, 106–9). My field accounts in a rehabilitated village called Suryatalav in Daboi Taluka of Maharashtra justify the accounts of the NGOs on inadequacy in distribution of rehabilitation benefits and inconsistency in compensation packages. Suryatalav is a remote village which is challenged by floods during the monsoon season, unevenly distributed fertile cultivatable lands, non-potable water, and poor water storage systems necessitating a walk of several miles to fetch water for drinking and household purposes. Some higher-ranking village leaders with existing relationships to R&R officers managed to obtain favorable compensation package. Other villagers who were dissatisfied with their allotted lands initially relocated but later returned to their resettlement village. When I questioned the government officer in charge of rehabilitation in this area, he asserted that, “rehabilitation was 100 percent complete, and the villagers falsified their problems with resettlement”. My in-person visit to Suryatalav to conduct surveys provided me with an opportunity to lodge with the

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villagers and gave me the chance to compare firsthand the civic amenities with the R&R officer’s misleading descriptions. As mentioned earlier in this section, the people of Nimar had participated in the congressional party led by Nimar Bachao Andolan during the 1970s unlike the hill Nimadi (hill) Adivasis, who were only marginally interested in electoral politics. After being abandoned by Arjun Singh, the villagers were doubtful whether Medha Patkar was trustworthy or another power broker who would sell them out like the Congress Party politicians did a decade earlier. Once they had verified Patkar’s intentions, they were moved by her selflessness and accepted her as an advocate and described her as a charismatic woman of much rage and magnetism. Patkar introduced a new ideology of collective consciousness and the instigated the fight for lost rights. Her approach to mobilize the people was genuine while her analysis of the inconsistencies of SSP was so practical that all those who opposed the dam became readily inspired and motivated by her tactics of struggle. In fear of displacement risks and inscrutable bureaucracy, the villagers trusted the NGOs to negotiate on their behalf with the state schemes. The peoples’ cultural and economic linkages with the environment and their trust on Medha Patkar led to the further progression of the alliance of dedicated activists in the NBA. With their grasp of environmental justice, quality of life, and economic marginalization, the NBA argued against the politics of Indigenous erasure and in favor of Adivasi honor, dignity, and autonomy, while incorporating a crucial respect of Adivasis agency. Further, the NBA protest activity directly engaged in the struggle to defend local ecological niches such as forests, rivers, grazing areas, cultural and grounds from the risks of industrial abuse to their environmental integrity. The inexorable progress of large development projects, resource extractive industrialization, and rapid urbanization has been glorified as symbols of modernity, pertinent for any nation’s prosperity. Large development projects, such as SSP, were highly criticized as environmentally unsustainable and detrimental to any land-based societies like the Adivasis of the Narmada valley. Paradoxically, while the dam was demonized as environmentally unsustainable, Nimaris’ agricultural practices utilized farm machinery, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and energy-intensive irrigation, which exemplified the model of agriculture that was decried by environmentalists as unsustainable. Thus, Nimar was not an entirely successful embodiment of the NBA’s general critique of development. The violent response of government to the Andolan reveals the true character of the

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state as nondemocratic, elitist, and authoritarian. The rallying call of the Narmada Bachao Andolan for Hamaare gaon mein hamaara raj (Our rule in our villages) repudiates the legitimacy of the state and asserts in its place the alternative of village self-government. The slogan, Hamaare gaon mein hamaara raj, calls for non-cooperation with the state, implementing the Gandhian method of passive resistance against exploitative authoritarian state-corporatist development. Here, Jan Andolan (peoples’ movement), or decentralized and non-violent collective action, is posited as a political alternative to the dominant political system. Among the many layers of Adivasi issues, the Andolan’s strategy was to address the overarching cause of environmental unsustainability of the dam while setting aside questions about class and caste conflict in Nimar and overlooking other rehabilitation-related anomalies. Such a strategic prioritizing by NBA was, to a large extent, dictated by the exigencies of the battle against the state. To retain its character as a movement based on mass action, the Andolan employed strategies of lobbying endorsing and soliciting intervention by candidates from major political parties who declared their sympathy for the Andolan. While the Andolan gained positive image globally and locally through its conduct of collective resistance outside the structures of electoral politics, it also compromised by setting aside its ideological position to act pragmatically. Thus, the Gandhian slogan of village self-government was deployed as one among several strategies to affect the state. The presentation of clearly articulated goals, less combative means, and more bargaining were considered more likely to meet the specific objectives of the group. The Andolan exploited all available political arenas by simultaneously battling on many fronts, arranging protest movements and marches at global and local levels, lobbying and pressuring state and central governments directly, and through the intercession of sympathetic party politicians. Nonviolence was usually an effective form of resistance and was used by the NBA and the Adivasis until the government acknowledged their demands. Nonviolent tactics were employed as a tool to negotiate with the state when they would not agree to adopt a compensation package that recognized Indigenous peoples’ rights. As interests were clarified, nonviolence was increasingly replaced by social negotiation. To apply both direct and indirect pressure on the state, the Andolan orchestrated events of public protest toward three groups: the state, its referent public, and the affected people. The Andolan’s ability to resolve fights was evident

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when people in the valley came together in demonstrations that culminated in a release of collective effervescence, with the masses singing and chanting slogans. These demonstrations were aimed, via the media (with the exception of the government-controlled radio or television channels), at crystallizing the views of an anonymous public (the affluent and literate middle and upper classes). To capture the attention and support of the educated middle class, the Andolan worked toward vibrant events or easily attended meetings and demonstrations (Baviskar, 1995). At one such meeting for the dam-impacted Adivasis, an active and influential Andolan supporter from Delhi gave a speech stating that the Adivasis were “mother earth’s children” and that the dam would tear these children from their mother’s breast. Although the Adivasis generally preferred more prosaic descriptions of the threat to their land and livestock, this speech evidently had an impact because similar metaphors and metonymies were used to project Adivasi vulnerability through media. Although the NBA was neither consistent in their tactics of protest nor ideologically coherent, the Andolan used all available opportunities creatively under highly adverse conditions. Their success was evident in their ability to unite two groups as disparate as the Nimaris and hill Adivasis. Despite its complexity, the valley’s struggle was understood and appropriated in quite another way by the educated urban middle class who were concerned about incorporating the Andolan into a theoretical critique of the paradigm of development. This led to a settling of the awkward parts of the movement, such as the presence of the Patridars, or the absence of ecological sustainability, to demonstrate that the movement constituted a theoretically satisfying challenge to the developmental state, even though the reality was more ambiguous.

Andolan Strategies Dwivedi (1999) has argued that the movement exhibits a “coreperiphery” structure, where the core consists of knowledgeable, skilled, experienced city youths, outside the valley, who took majority of the movement decisions on tactics, strategies, resources, and providing financial logistical support. The activists lobbied nationally and internationally, holding meetings, protesting in opportune locations, building alliance with global environmental, human rights, and Indigenous groups, raising

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funds, and planning strategies on alternatives to development. NBA conducted its resistance, synchronously, at multiple scales. First, the NBA was ingenious in strategizing non-violent direct-action protests such as Jal Samarpan, the drowning squad, consisting of a group of devoted villagers who were ready to drown themselves with the rising water due to submergence. In addition, the Andolan enabled women, who were traditionally cloistered, to come out of their homes and take to the streets, demonstrating in front of project authority’s offices, raising slogans, challenging the police, and taunting bureaucrats and politicians— Medha Patkar brought about this revolutionary change (Baviskar, 1995). In the valley, such comradeship was an unknown possibility prior to the SSP conflict. Second, the NBA employed—the cause of displacement by the dam and the question of land significantly uniting two disparate constituencies: hill Adivasis and Patridars (Nimaris)5 —toward their fight against the project. Patridars are the wealthy farming communities of the Narmada plains, on whom Adivasis were acutely dependent for loaning monies, seeds, farm machinery, and such like. These affluent groups were also responsible for historic exploitation of the Adivasis, such as pushing them to the less fertile areas or the infertile hilly tracts—a procedure that was intensified with the practice of colonial plantation agriculture. For villagers, who were active in the movement, the key issue for confronting state development efforts was the loss of their land and commonly held resources. In part, the mediating presence of activists in Maharashtra and MP was trusted by the hill Adivasis for their demonstrated partisanship and harmonious workmanship. Overarching unity was mainly because different groups worked together as Andolan members. Several Nimari activists were highly regarded by the Adivasis. Many Patridars spoke Bhilali, the language spoken by the Bhils, as they experienced in dealing with Adivasi laborers. Despite taboos about untouchability and food, Adivasis and Patridars camped together during the month-long Sangarsh Yatra (march). During the yatra, many disparaging yet humorous anecdotes were tended to provoke laughter about how the Adivasi could

5 Patridars and Nimaris are interchangeably used. Patridars migrated from Gujarat and settled down in the banks of Narmada and Tapti valley (parts of MP). In Chapter 2, I have narrated that the Patridars settled in fertile riverbanks pushing the Adivasis to the hills. These settled Patridars are also called Nimaris which means plains dwellers. Adivasis raided the rich Nimaris in lean seasons when they could hardly grow crops.

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walk forever, but the soft Patridars would not survive the march to the dam-site. I analyze this as a critique of power spoken in front of the dominant, similar to Scott’s public transcript (1990). These de-constructions of power also make the Sardar Sarovar as a unique spatial ground where interconnections across the layers of power maintained, obliterated, and reconstructed. Despite the comradeship between the Patridars and the Adivasis, during SSP protests, their historic class conflicts and economic impoverishment of Adivasis cannot be denied or overlooked. The Andolan had dealt with anomaly of Nimar by using a two-fold strategy. First, it had showcased the hill Adivasis—truly the worst-hit by the project and downplayed the presence of Patridars. The Andolan was mostly composed of Patridar activists. The Patridars’ interest in the Andolan was maximized as they were large land holders. The Andolan argued that submergence was largely affecting the Adivasis’ nature-culture relationship. The Patridars are among India’s politically powerful middle and rich peasantry (Byres, 1981). Although their lands have always been fertile, their productivity rose tremendously during the early 1970s, after electrification since they could make use of power to irrigate the fields or use other farming machinery. The fields in the higher grounds of the river valley had earlier been watered by wells. But after the seventies, they could be abundantly watered by electric pumps. This opened the options to grow a wide variety of water-dependent crops such as, bananas, papayas, cotton, and sugarcane besides growing traditionally grown crops like chillis and groundnuts. Not surprisingly, this class had benefited from state subsidies. Plentiful water had enabled many farmers to grow remunerative crops. The highly capital-intensive agriculture enmeshed most Nimari farmers in a web of debt. But cultivators talk of the need to invest large sums of money from money lenders at an interest of 25 percent per annum to keep the agricultural process solvent. Smaller landowners did not have this economic cushion that would allow them to sit on unattractive prices, or grow the more profitable commercial crops, which had longer gestation periods. The system was, therefore, skewed in favor of larger farmers (Baviskar, 1995; Dwivedi, 1999). Third, the interface between NBA and the state suggests the discourses on power versus resistance. Radical scholarship has problematized power as an act which can be used and subverted. Power is used as a verb that can be used by the dominant. People resisted the state’s resettlement efforts and collectively reacted against the strategies of the state. Arguably, power can be exercised by everyone in subtle ways (Cresswell,

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1996). Resistance is an act of power that is used by the subservient, i.e., the internally displaced Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of the Narmada valley. In this context, resistance is an art of exercising free will. Working with the adversities of the SSP, Adivasis exercised their free will against the state apparatuses (to receive resettlement benefits) and eventually against the NBA after the identification of the NBA motives as continuing to skirmish against the state for survival. The NBA gradually changed their position from better rehabilitation to a total rejection of the construction of the SSP voicing “Koi nahin hatenga! Baandh nahin banenga!” (No one will move! the dam will not be built!). A meeting was arranged by Medha Patkar and leaders of NBA with the WB executive directors from donor countries and their staff. The NBA leaders elaborated extensively on the realities of the environmental and resettlement problems pertaining to the project. The Andolan called for a comprehensive review of the project. They also opposed the clear-felling of trees, which disturbed the environmental equilibrium and led to biodiversity changes (Udall, 1995). Fourth, the NBA served writ petition to the Supreme Court, organized with other movements, created the National Alliance of people’s movements that opposed the liberalization of the Indian economy in solidarity. Andolan consisted of representatives from all over the country and was supported by international NGOs (such as Environmental Defence Fund, Environmental Policy Institute, Friends of the Earth, International Rivers Network (IRN), and National Wildlife Federation). Collectively, they urged the United States Congress for requesting the WB to stop funding the SSP. Besides this, the Independent Review of the WB submitted by Morse and Berger in 1992 was highly critical of the SSP. All these factors forced the Bank to withdraw from the project. Similar persistent efforts by the Friends of the Earth in Japan convinced the Japanese government to suspend funding the SSP on environmental grounds (Udall, 1995, 201– 230). The Andolan exhibited strength in the Narmada valley through demonstrations, chanting slogans, and satyagraha (hunger-strikes). In February 1989, about 8,000 people gathered at the dam-site to protest the construction of the SSP. Many among them were beaten and arrested. The NBA non-violently demanded for an end to all projects, which devastated the environment and destroyed peoples’ livelihoods. Its defiant message to politicians and planners was that “people are no longer prepared to watch in mute desperation, as project after destructive project is heaped on them in the name of development and progress” (NBA,

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Delhi 1991, 4). For a week, the local people of the Narmada valley marched in a procession singing and chanting slogans. The parade was stopped at the interstate border in Gujarat and MP by a massive police blockade. Unable to proceed toward the dam-site, 2,000 people camped at the Gujarat border for a month in winter. After three weeks, they terminated the struggle to a more adamant non-cooperation movement against the state stating “Hamaara gaon mein hamaara raj ” (Self-rule in our villages) (Baviskar, 1995). The NBA followed tactics like the Gandhian non-violent resistance against colonial rule. The NBA shifted its focus of struggle to Manibeli (in Maharashtra), where the rising dam wall could result in submergence of houses and lands if water level rose in monsoons. NBA asserted that the affected people would prefer to die than leave their villages. They formed a sampriti dal or the drowning squad, i.e., a group of people who would drown themselves with the rise in water levels. The police attempted to evict the people forcefully, but the threat to jal samarpan (drowning) created serious press coverage and forced the governments to undertake a comprehensive review (Patkar, 1995, 157–178). Different groups who visited the valley to be taught about the struggles, to participate, and to consequently aggregate information about it continue to provide links with the NBA and carry out solidarity work on its behalf. The NBA formed alliances with legislators and aid bureaucrats in the USA and Japan who in turn controlled the WB funding activities. These acts unsurprisingly involved a transnational alliance with 128 diverse organizations and dominant funding sources to derive legitimacy from the West (Udall, 1995). Lastly, according to de Certeau (1988), resistance movements are “tactics” that are played by villagers with the help of the NGOs as the “art of the weak”, which attempts to destabilize the acts of oppression. These movements can be conceived as liquids that flow through the cracks and crevices of power. Power maneuvers them through “guileful ruses of interests and desires” (de Certeau 1988). Involuntary dislocation disturbed the tribal peoples’ tryst with nature placing affected people in the trap of uneven development. A reading through the series of movements in the Narmada valley reveals the various tactics adopted by the Andolan to gain national and global significance. Their display of power through processions, fasting, chanting of songs and slogans, and drowning squads attracted wide coverage in the press and forced the government to negotiate. The Andolan tactically placed women at the forefront of the demonstrations opposing the dam. To counter tactics of the locals and

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activists, strategies were employed by the state to control and manipulate the lives of the people. Strategies are specific type of knowledge that impacts the lives of people who are subjected to its power (de Certeau 1988). The government officials had little concern toward the women activists and subjected them to brutal assault, ripping off their clothes in public and dragging them along by their hair. In one incident, one expecting woman was repeatedly struck on her stomach with a rifle butt (PUCL, 1990). Besides, suppressing the peaceful demonstrations and non-violent acts of the NBA, the government officials tried to breakdown the movement by threatening the villagers and bribing the local tribal leaders. The collector of Jhabua, who was the head of the district administrative service, mentioned to the villagers that the combined might of the state (‘lathi (stick), bullet and pen’) will be used to evict the people from their lands. Scott’s (1990) public transcript is the dominant power holder’s hidden behavior. The dominant strategically shape and manipulate the lives of the people to fulfill their goal or interest using policy and documentation. The state, further, suppresses the confidence of the people. Powerful groups who were active against the project were harassed and their works were hampered. Once, the people were forced to take off their clothes and spend nights in a cold cell without food. They were constantly tracked by the police, tortured, and humiliated (Baviskar, 1995; Patkar, 1995, 157–178).

Alternative Politics In several ways, discourses, policies, and actions of the state were complementary with those of the NBA or the tribal constituents. Adivasis readily participated in state resettlement programs that expropriated their use of village land, while others vigorously opposed such policies. The NBA and the Adivasi collaboration characterizes complicated discursive interactions, similar political articulation, and some conflicts in opinions and views. The impacted villagers who took a no-dam stand with the NBA ultimately accepted the compensation and relocated suffering from resistance fatigue and future uncertainty. The reasons behind contestation between NBA and the villagers were material interests of the people, distribution of risks, opportunities of resettlement policies, and strategic predisposition of action groups. To some, resistance did not rank as an option while to others resistance was the only option. Some understood resistance as a risk while others resisted to better the compensation package.

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However, the pivotal reasons for struggle in the valley have been lack of compensation benefits, good will of the government officials, and government negotiations (Baviskar, 1995; Dwivedi, 1999; Gandhi, 2003; Patel, 1995b; Patkar, 1995). Most significantly, the NBA engaged in alternative development practices taking advantage of the lack of transparency of the government on the information on the project, future of the impacted people, and ecological loss of the landscape. I made a few edits here, please incorprate these sentences and remove the previous sentences. Some of the alternatives to development advanced by the grassroots organizations were creation of new services in the relocated areas, construction of small-scale hydro power project in places like Domkhedi that generated electricity, provided drinking water, and reduced the workloads of women carrying water for long distance. The SSP was not only eliminating the means of survival and livelihoods of Adivasis but also destroyed their meanings attached to these spaces. Various programs were launched to teach young people to learn Bhilala and Pawri besides the mainstream, languages, Indigenous poems, songs, and stories. These alternative spaces disrupt the invisibility of the Adivasis. This multidimensionality is indicative of an alternative politics that seeks to generate spaces of autonomy of action outside the state and corporate circles (Peet & Watts, 1993). The NBA questioned the state ideology and mechanisms, by outlining critiques of neoliberal development philosophy and the responsibility of the state toward the people and their surrounding environment (Kothari & Parajuli, 1993).

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Yapa, L. (1999). A primer on postmodernism with a view to understanding poverty. www.geog.psu.edu/yapa/Discourse.htm. Last accessed December 2020.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusions: Gender, Nature, Development

Abstract Feminist scholars have for long analyzed gender, class, ethnicity, race, and caste, arguing the importance of the social categories in social science research. The chapter follows an empirical analysis of violence of development on gendered bodies and nature. Reflecting on the lack of acknowledgement to women, who are exploitable or labeled as irrational and vulnerable and non-human environment that is objectified as surplus or expendable—explaining how the organization of capital facilitate and relay on violent ways to accumulate through development projects. To establish this argument, the chapter follows narratives collected from women on social transformation due to the changes in their surrounding environment and livelihood practices. Keywords Gender · Nature · Development · Third world subject

In this final chapter, I conclude with an exclusive analysis of the women in the valley as collected from their stories during the ethnography. The chapter will take a “longue durée perspective” (Whitehead, 2010) on the construction of the dam, its multi-leveled and multi-scalar impact on the domination and subordination of gendered outsees, the resettlement and relocation (R&R) flaws and policy loopholes, and the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4_6

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profound social transformations that occurred through the appropriation and accumulation through the construction and operation of the dam. Western scientific discursive articulations on nature and development have ignored or overlooked the interconnections of nature, development, and women from the Global South in particular, and the “Third world subject” in general. Significantly, liberal feminism was not outside of the limitations of acknowledging women’s significant part as gatherers, grazers, and farmers, or in recognizing their potential for contributions to militant actions. That women are simultaneously autonomous in providing care to their families and sustainable users of their surrounding environment, while also committed activists in resistance movements of the Narmada dam was grossly overlooked by radical academic analysis of class and social movements. Stories on everyday realities of R&R helped me comprehend the shaping of gendered roles and activities in private and public spaces. Spaces have little meaning without practices. I formulate my understanding of social space along the lines of the Lefebvrian conceptualization of representations of space and representational spaces (Lefebrve, 1991). Lefebvre’s representational spaces may be lived spaces that account for people’s everyday spatial activities, gendered roles, and social relationships. These spaces can also be “sites of resistance and counter-discourses” not easily grasped by those foreign to a place, community, or network (Stewart, 1995, 611). Another form of representational spaces are built spaces, which include spaces of architecture, development planners, physical infrastructure, political institutions, and state apparatus. As such, the holders of these spaces attempt to use and control them as resources (Domosh, 1997, 210). An example of representational spaces is the rehabilitated villages that the Adivasi displacees1 inhabited for several generations, which remain in people’s imaginations, memories, stories, and poems as symbolic landscapes that they cherish to recall. During my ethnography, they were undergoing profound sociospatial changes through R&R. Prior to dislocation, the displaced Adivasis lived in villages that were categorized as “submerging villages” in the R&R policy books. At the time of my ethnography, these submerged villages were either inundated or scheduled to be submerged within a few years. At the writing of this 1 The word displacee is used to describe the people affected by the SSP, whether displaced or due to be displaced in the future.

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book, these villages are engulfed by the reservoir. The stories shared with me by the Adivasi include distressing memories of the submerging villages. These memories are unique in that the generations of people who lived there have been amputated from these lands—the forests, ancestral graves, temples, the rolling topography, or mundane spaces that had significance only to the people inhabiting those villages. The Sardar Sarovar project (SSP) impacted the Narmada River Valley by overlaying the reservoir zone, command area, and downstream of the dam. The area of the river that is flooded and inundated by the construction of a dam is the area upstream of the dam. The dam also utterly changes the ecology of the land downstream of the dam by changing the seasonal flow of water. The Narmada River2 basin was populated by 22 million people, 80% of whom were economically dependent on rain-fed agriculture, livestock, and forest produce. In submerged villages, the incidence of landlessness (Cernea, 1997; Cernea & McDowell, 2000, Nayak, 1995, 2000) was a factor of concern as almost every family owned some revenue land or farmed forestland that they held as common land (kharaba).3 At the time of land appropriation for the SSP, the latter group was illegally categorized as “encroachers”. Overnight, the villagers who held the commons for generations, with or without a land title, became labeled as thieves by the draconian Land Acquisition Act (LAA)4 of 1984 (GOI, 1984). This group was excluded from monetary or land compensation. All Adivasi villagers were functioning at subsistence levels; marketable surplus from cultivation was uncommon and was not a source of income 2 For Hindus, the Narmada is the river of bliss, born from the body of Shiva, so every stone on the bed of the river is a miniature shiva linga (is an abstract or aniconic representation of the Hindu god Shiva). A shiva linga looks like a well-polished stone that looks like male phyllus. A lingum is worthy of worship as Shiva (the god of destruction and regeneration in the Hindu sacred triad). The people along the banks hold her to be more sacred than the Ganges (Baviskar, 1995). 3 The common forestland extensively cultivated by the villagers is called kharaba. They do not own these lands legally, and the R&R policies did not compensate the villagers for the encroached lands. Gradually, the R&R policies were modified with prolonged resistance from the locals and the NGOs. Now, all encroacher displaces are compensated with two hectares of land in Gujarat—if the lands were encroached before April 1984, and if this encroached land was submerged. 4 The LAA is a statutory statement of the state’s power of eminent domain, which allows the state to have ultimate control over lands within its territory. Hence, the LAA permits acquisition of land for public purposes regardless of the owner’s choice as to whether he or she is willing to move from his or her land.

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(Dwivedi, 1999). During abnormal monsoons or crop failures, forage from the forests nourished them. The concept and definition of food security changed with submergence. The measure of reliance on cultivation and natural resources gathered from forest landscapes varied from village to village. One of the first relocations took place in the early 1980s, when people from 10 villages in Vadgam were moved to Golagambdi, where my ethnography was carried out. At Vadgam, livelihood mechanisms were of wide variety (see Chapter 5); as a result, losing the commons added to the villagers’ vulnerability to economic marginalization. Many villagers cultivated land and depended on the gathering of natural resources from the forested landscape for extra income. Besides this income, most of the villagers had herds of cattle, access to fishing and employment as laborers in dam-site within a 10-mile radius of Vadgam. Based on former landholdings and economic conditions, villagers were classified into four groups: 1. Large landowners: owned 15 acres of land or more.5 2. Marginal landowners: owned less than 15 acres of land. 3. Common landowners: cultivated common lands.6 4. Landless laborers: labored for large landowners.7 The forthcoming discourses indicate variations in the villagers’ emotions and worries toward the implications of displacement based on their previous economic conditions.8 5 A majority of the farmers were in this category. The overall land quality was not good, so crop productivity was low. Sometimes they grew double crops in the monsoons and nothing in winter. 6 According to the LAA (1984), no compensation was given to those who were unable to produce legal land titles. Through this policy, not only the legal landholders lost land, but the marginal farmers and landless laborers who encroached on government forestlands or common lands were converted to landlessness. 7 Most of the poor or middle-class peasants worked as temporary laborers, and/or collected minor forest products and timber on a contract basis. 8 Initially, monetary compensation given by the government was in accordance with the land owned legally. Thus, those who cultivated common lands or those who were unable to produce legal land titles, such as women-led households, major sons and landless laborers, were seldom entitled to land or monetary compensation. Before the R&R policy was modified that is considered providing land compensation, house plots, draught

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Submergence impacted the women far more significantly than it did men beyond repair. As villages submerged, the forest products, fuel wood, and fodder that women had previously collected were lost, as was their familiarity with the context and location of these collectables. This dislocation represented a loss of women’s household decision-making power, as well as a serious loss of their economic autonomy and social position. Dislocation fragmented their close-knit livelihood dependence and use of common land (Dhagamwar et al., 1995). The group of villagers who extensively cultivated common lands, such as forests and barren lands, also depended on secondary employment and income from selling timber and minor forest products. This group insisted that the government should recognize the commonly held lands for farming as their economic resource and duly compensate them for losing the lands. Landless villagers9 who worked as temporary laborers were outside the scope of land compensation. They were concerned over receiving a house plot and temporary employment in rehabilitated sites. Furthermore, they felt insecure due to the fear of acute marginalization10 (Das, 1982). R&R state apparatuses did not elaborate or clarify the consequences of dislocation. In the initial stages of negotiation, villagers in collaboration with the local NGOs appealed for the right to information on the extent and plan of submergence, the prospects in rehabilitated sites, and the R&R compensation package from the government. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the state governments (Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh11 ) revised the compensation policies. Today, the R&R policy has drastically changed, although discrepancies remain across villages and different classes of villagers (see Chapter 4).

animals, and some public amenities to the rehabilitated villages. Some villagers who owned large tracts of land chose to take monetary compensation to purchase land of their choice within 10 miles of their submerged villages. This willingness to relocate in nearby villages was due to their familiarity and affinity with the land, surrounding environment, cultural networks, and social relations with villages in the area (Joshi, 2000). 9 Some categories of landless villagers were encroachers, shop-owners, fisherfolks, artisans, dairy farmers, and so on. 10 All affected villagers risked socio-cultural disarticulation, i.e., socio-cultural and economic losses incurred through dislocation and resettlement. So, Cernea (1990) proposed that the state governments should provide economic opportunities, community infrastructure, and material assets in the new sites to all the displaced populations (Cernea, 1990; Cernea & Guggenheim, 1993; World Bank, 1994). 11 Acronymically Madhya Pradesh is termed as MP, see previous chapters.

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Although policy changes were intended to offset economic losses, they failed to make up for the socio-cultural losses, such as the fragmentation of displaced families and villages, and intergenerational connections with their environment. Many villagers were separated from their sons and brothers, aunts and uncles, and neighboring communities. Many women were not able to visit their married daughters in other villages, located hundreds of miles away from their rehabilitated villages, and grieved their loss as if their daughters had died (Dhagamwar et al., 1995). For instance, Lakshmi Bhen12 grieved from the loss of her connection with her brothers and parents who were now located hundreds of miles from her resettled village. Additionally, the resettled women were subjected to the challenges of the market economy13 and losing access to forests and river resources had the effect of economically confining their household role and income to agriculture. The Adivasi migrants’ socio-cultural uniqueness was being transformed, communally and economically, through their exposure to urban cultures, Hindu rituals, predominance of mainstream languages, and a rapid erosion of Adivasi dialects. Women experienced the constant challenge to adjust and acclimatize with host communities and the city populations. All the intricacies dislocation produced dismal and disparate feelings and a wide set of emotional unease anticipating future risks in rehabilitated villages. In Lefebvrian framework of conceptualization of spaces, I refer to the landscapes in which the women resonated most strongly as “personal spaces”. Personal space describes the gender-specific work and women’s hidden emotions shared with me in their stories. Studies have shown that South Asian women, in particular, work long hours and carry the maximum responsibility for domestic work, whereas South Asian men perform less than 5% of domestic caregiving responsibilities (Amin, 1974), though I would argue that, with current emancipation, employment, and education, this scenario is gradually changing. Studies also document that woman play a substantial role in subsistence agriculture, but their contributions are underestimated or utterly ignored by their male counterparts, government policy makers, and data collectors (Cain 12 Bhen means sister and was used after most married or aged women. Lakshmi Bhen was one of my respondents. 13 The Adivasis, who never sold anything for cash but bartered their forest produce for necessary items, like grains, tools, and clothes, were exposed to many changes in their social as well as economic lives after rehabilitation.

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et al., 1979; Rahman, 1986; Safilios-Rothschild & Mahmud, 1989). It is further recorded that more women than men work in unskilled jobs where incomes are low and labor protections are loosely enforced (Lawson, 1998, 2000), and where women are easy to hire and fire. Moreover, with neoliberalization and globalization globally and in South Asia, women, in general, and the female workforce, in particular, have become extremely malleable and exploitable (Flore, 1991; Florbe, 1988). Often poor, single women’s work is remunerated with farm produce or other goods of daily use, instead of monetary wages (Amin, 1974). Many times, what women earn through non-capital wages are difficult to measure in relation to the work they generate and provide. Thus, women’s work remains invisible, unrecognized, undocumented, and undervalued. Although the manner of exploitation may be different, if we consider the global portrait of women’s work, the same struggle exists for women in Global South and in Global North. The following narrative from Raten Bhen lists various activities performed by her throughout the day that equate to unpaid work. According to her: I do all household work, like cooking, caring for children, tending vegetables, cleaning, and feeding the cattle, fetching water, besides performing various farm activities. I still hear from my husband that I stay idle at home. He never acknowledges the work I do, and the care I provide to him and the children. Though I am slightly more educated than him, my opinions regarding cultivation, savings or household expenditures are not considered. (Raten Bhen, female respondent, age 23, Sonadra Village; interview by author 29 May 2004 in Chattopadhyay, 2010, 95).

She revealed her stories to me when her husband was not home. As the women’s everyday lives were divulged through their voiced stories, I captured their hidden discontent and disapproval of the behavior of spouses, mother-in-laws, and other family members. This situation is an example of Scott’s hidden transcript (1990, xii)—a critique of power constructed by the subservient as they feel empowered in the absence of the authority figure. Under conditions of increasing commodification of the peasant economy, the household is not a simple conglomerate of individuals obtaining a livelihood from the same subsistence and commodity base. Rather, individuals embark on various gender-specific activities and production, varying from subsistence cultivation to migratory wage labor. In Golagambdi, where farming is conducted by both women and men, a

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useful classification can be made in terms of gender-specific farm activities. For example: …Women do not plough lands, drive tractors, or fit pumps for irrigation; rather, they tend the cattle, weed the farms, plant seeds, and harvest crops with their male counterparts. In one case I found a mother-in-law engaged in ploughing, planting, and harvesting along with her husband and sons, while her daughter-in-law (like other women in the village) tended cattle and performed household chores. Other than this marketing their produce, which affects their overall economic conditions. (Chattopadhyay, 2014, 16–18)

Amin’s work (1974) exposed interconnectedness between poverty and the privations of rural single women households. Women made single through widowhood, divorce, or other means, are socially isolated, and trapped by patriarchal societal norms, which reduce their opportunities to obtain waged jobs. This social construct also impedes their spatial activities and freedom of movement inside and outside the villages. Married women working outside their family farm are understood as having downward social mobility, even when the family is in great need for additional income. In the villages, I surveyed, women were not working outside their family farms. Social disciplining and domestication began from childhood for gender-specific household and agricultural work (Almott & Matthaie, 1991; Glen, 1992; Jackson & Penrose, 1993; Massey, 1994; Radcliffe, 1990, 1991, 1992). From the age where they can walk and prior to marriage, young girls are taught to carry out household chores, provide care, attend schools, and take part in community functions with their mothers (Almott & Matthaie, 1991, 13–14; McDowell, 1993, 1999). Parents are ambivalent about young boys taking part in academic training in agricultural practices, as it is assumed that boys will learn farm work. This disparity is a result of the assumption that girls will be married, and an inability to perform housework or fulfill household expectations in their husband’s families would be disgraceful for the girl’s parents. An adolescent girl described her interest in pursuing higher education before getting married: I am a third year Sociology student. I wish to study more. I do not feel that I am prepared for getting married. My parents never forced me to marry. But my father is sick, and my maternal uncles contribute towards our family expenses. If they propose marriage, my parents will not disagree.

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My decision has no value. (Mangla, female respondent, age 19, Sonadra Village; interview by author 29 July 2004 in Chattopadhyay, 2010, 95)

In my survey locations, women climbed the social ladder of respect and power through marriage, following childbirth and with aging. If marriage is the first major step in passing out the category of adolescence, then becoming pregnant and successfully bearing children is considered the next (Warner et al., 1997). In Kundi Ucchakalam, an elderly woman clarified inter-household spatial activities and family histories. While showing the house spaces, she pointed to a picture of a deity and said that worshipping this deity blessed her once-infertile daughter-in-law with a male child. However, her daughter-in-law had a different version of the same story: My mother-in-law worshipped the Mother Goddess because I was not getting a child. Most of the time, I heard I was infertile and held a low status among the women at home and in the community. The family administered different medicines, changed faith on deities, performed different religious practices, and experimented with various medicinal herbs. After 10 years of trial and error, I gave birth. Surely some maternal ill-health conditions caused the delay, but my mother-in-law strongly believes the child was born by Mother Goddess’s blessings. (Parvati Bhen, female respondent, age 32, Kusumbdi Village; interview by author 27 July 2004 in Chattopadhyay, 2010, 96)

The transition of capitalism and recent influences of neoliberalization and globalization redefines gendered productive activities and social reproduction. Classical Marxism has illustrated that capitalist societies quantify social value from natural landscape under capitalism (Kovel, 2009). This pathway has led to profound accumulation, whereby socioeconomic relations drastically altered nature through rapid commodification, competition, and neoliberal marketization. This is destructive for both human and non-human nature. Social reproduction ceases to market capitalist forces, while nature diminishes to a tool of the production mechanisms. Unlike conventional commodification of nature that profits from the use value of raw materials or natural resources, the contemporary forms of commodification under green capitalism are geared to extracting exchange value from social and natural relations. Federici’s work on reproduction illustrates the blending of “capitalism and patriarchy in keeping housework unwaged; reproducing women’s labour socially and globally; alienating

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people from commonly held resources and communing autonomous initiatives” (Chattopadhyay, 2015; 2019, 3). Social reproduction is the variegated work that is carried out naturally on bodies that serve to reproduce everyday life. The dual nature of social reproduction is “work that reproduces us and “valorizes” us not only in view of our integration in the labor market but also against it” (Chattopadhyay, 2019; Federici, 2012, 2). Federici (2004, 2012) attests to the social construction of gender roles, spatial division of labor, and the transformation of social positions as historic and social conditions under which gendered bodies were subsumed under patriarchy and capitalism—which is central to the constitution of femininity. She writes: […] enclosures expropriated the peasantry from communal land … which were thus “liberated” from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for production of labor. (DallaCosta & James, 1972; Federici, 2004, 184, Mies, 1986)

She concludes that “just as the enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunting expropriated women from their bodies, who were “liberated” from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor” (Federici, 2004, 12). These discussions highlight the importance of women as a subject of inquiry in political economy and the crucial role they played in understanding the link between capital and the body. Marx wrote: […] capital comes out on the face of the head dripping blood and dirt from head to toe’ (1909, vol 1, 834), and indeed capitalism had developed as a massive ‘concentration camp’ (Federici, 2004, 64) which exploited living labor in the form of human beings and dead labor in the form of resources appropriated from. village commons or vast swaths of feral jungles through scientific forestry. (Chattopadhyay, 2014; Harvey, 2009; Sivaramakrishnan, 1995)

Federici expands on the containment and coercion of women’s bodies in various ways by identifying the shortcomings of Marxist primitive accumulation (of wealth) that ignores women’s contributions in capitalist relations, while also questioning the Foucauldian analysis of body, biopower, and the politics of sexuality. Both Marxist and Foucauldian led gender-neutral analyses that circumvented the interconnections between the violence on women’s bodies and sexuality, imperialist domination, and

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hierarchal power relations14 (Holub, 1992). An ontological surfacing of the body within the capitalist framework shows that the promotion of life-forces was for nothing more than the accumulation and reproduction of labor.15 The broader and specific geographic inquiries across different places and contexts also matter tremendously, such as the ‘national body’ and the ‘body-politic’. Bodies and places are neither unique nor universal. Developing an understanding of the ways in which bodies and places are interrelated and how they can influence one another depends on contextspecificity, place-specificity, and different identities of bodies superimposed with differences in struggles gained impetus in the third wave of feminism. Succinctly, bodily geographies that dodge the essentialist and universalist conceptualizations of the body open up a new discursive terrain to engage knowledges on bodies of color, of different sexual orientations, of different geographic context or disabled bodies, and bodies in detention, camps, jails, hospitals, and schools. (Chattopadhyay, 2019)

Concurrently, feminist scholars conceptualized bodily differences, differences in identity, and differences along specific conjunctures of power or by the intersectionality of multiple oppressions analyzing the interlocking forms of discrimination and marginalization experienced by populations 14 Take for example the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, young males, workers, and peasants revolted against social and economic oppression. To suppress the mass revolts, state authorities turned the anger of antagonistic men toward the women of the lower classes. Women were raped, gang raped, or sexually assaulted openly in the streets. This continued unabated, leading up to the decriminalization of rape, open violence over women, the legitimation of prostitution, and the growth of brothels. In fact, these developments were also considered remedies for homosexuality. Those who engaged in these nefarious sports were young journey men, domestic servants, workers, and insolvent sons of the wealthy class, while the targeted women were the poor proletariat, maids, or mistresses of their masters. Even the church viewed prostitution and rape as legitimate. The state functioned as the supreme manager of class relations (Federici, 2004, 47–50). 15 In Federici’s accounts, the social decline of the midwife and the healer, the extermination of bodies of single, widowed women, and the portrayal of women who dared to speak or protest as ‘heretics’ or the enchantress as witches. Witch-hunting undermined women’s control over their property and reproduction, specifically their access to birth control and generally their freedom to choose the fate of their own bodies. Therefore, this mass institutionalization of the state’s control over the female body was a precondition for the demotion of women’s position, autonomy, and pride. The genocidal proportions formulate an alternative understanding of knowledge and morality for capitalist patriarchal rationalization.

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(hooks, 1994; Mohanty, 2006). Ecofeminist de-constructions of female bodily experiences (e.g., of reproduction and childbearing) were based on their analysis of phenomenological philosophy (Seamon, 2012) and women’s sociopsychological consciousness of nature and body, not just the connections between women’s biology, sexuality, and nature. By recognizing and distinguishing the problematizations of body, Williams and Bendelow (1999, 43) analyze the regulation and restriction of bodies through social functions (i.e., “bodily order”) and influences and choices of how individuals live life and express themselves (i.e., “bodily control”), thus loosening the binaries, dualisms, and dichotomies between sex and gender and women and nature.16 The symbolic sex-gendered linguistic associations also inferiorized women with animalist terms like whores, bitches, cows, foxes, chicks, and old bats; and steadfastly described nature in sexualized terms such as conquered, tamed, and controlled. Nature was raped and mastered through articulations like: “virgin timber is felled” or “fertile soil is tilled” and “land that lies fallow is barren, useless”, or “her secrets penetrated”, and “her womb is put into the services of the man of science” (Warren, 2000, xv). The new images of mastery and domination were sanctioned to extract capital through the use of scientific forestry (see Chapter 4) (Agarwal & Sivaramakrishnan, 2000). Federici argues that domination of women and nature acknowledged the values and nurturing activities normally associated with women. Likewise, the material productivity of gendered bodies, the evolution of capitalism, and the increase of environmental crisis and social injustices were brought to the forefront with the advent of agricultural/green revolution (King, 1995). Representational complexities were based on patriarchal identifications of femaleness and its extensions to nature, but also introduced a different link to structures and strategies (different ways of knowing), coping strategies, and ways of relating to nature for women (and men). The construction of knowledge is historically contingent upon colonial politics and technologies of exploitation. It follows that the subjugation of the Native profoundly influences the contemporary modernization policies and mechanisms of economic progress, with obtrusive similarities

16 During the Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment (see Merchant, 2006) periods, metaphors and metonymies emerged from an ethnocentric reductionism of science and language (Mies & Shiva, 1993)—where nature was conceived as a benevolent and nurturing mother, au contraire as sterile, inert, and dead—at the disposal of technocratic resource managers for industrial growth.

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between “autonomous” colonial and post-colonial Indian development strategies. Further, discursive practices communicate that such knowledge not only generates a new discourse, but that these discourses are ingrained in the technical processes of the institutions, forms of transmission, and diffusion of information (Foucault, 1982). Here, I suggest that knowledge manufactured in post-colonial India and applied to the Adivasis is drawn from the orientalist discourses identifying Indigenous subsistence practices as environmentally damaging. Interconnections across native/local people, women, and the environment illustrate the gendered nature of resource usage and agriculture (1997), the development and reductionism of science (Shiva, 1993), the placing together of science and organic nature (Merchant, 1993, 2006), and the gendering of nature and nature-society relations (Warren, 2000). As Mohanty (1988) has long argued, the Western lens, and now modernization/development discourse, has produced a specific cultural discourse relating to the “third world” (however, sophisticated an explanatory colonial construct), which creates a politicodiscursive containment of heterogeneity of the subject(s). Anglo-Saxon masculinism, and later, an Anglocentric feminism subsumed all women in a “singular monolithic” condition, thereby drawing attention to the remarkably parallel effect of various analytical categories and liberal feminist strategies that codify their relationship to the “other” in implicitly hierarchical terms. Similarly, the universalized and essentialized progression of Western science as “neutral” and knowledge as “singular” (Bondi, 2003; Rose, 1993), with co-occurrent superiority of experiences and politics of white woman, dismisses the politics, differences, challenges, and individuality of South Asian women (Beale, 1971) as a non-issue. Working in the West, for several years, I have continued to function under the tutelage of my superiors or colleagues as the South Asian woman who is in constant need for guidance to “get there”. Although feminist scholarly practices outline relations and interconnections between power and knowledge, Western feminist self-presentation and representation of “Third world women” fail to forgo the universalization combining “third world difference” to sexual difference. The hypothesis that women are a coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic, or racial location, implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied collectively and cross culturally. A homogenous notion of women as a group produces the image of “average third world women” as oppressed and leading an

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essentially truncated life based on their feminine gender—therefore sexually constrained, ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented, victimized—in contrast, the (implied) selfrepresentation of Western women is of educated, modern, intelligent, and capable people in control over their bodies (see Narayan, 1998). Similar arguments calling in to question the methods of analysis of the Global South/Third World and “othering” and “ordering” the Third world subject have appeared in a wide variety of scholarship generated by Southern writers. On various occasions as a practicing academic, I have noticed that, despite feminist lectures on intersectionality, both professors and students fail to understand or attend to the history, politics, and power in connection to ethnicity, race, gender, and class. At the time, as a middle class, urban Asian scholar I was producing research on Indigenous villagers while codifying the participants as rural laboring class and their Indigenous histories and cultures as the “other” or as subject to academic analysis and writing. The question of when the “Third world subject” or the “Third world other” will graduate from the position of analysis in development scholarship stands as a vital question yet to be answered? Only through a vantage point of the Occident is it possible to define the “Third world” as underdeveloped and (economically) dependent. Without the over-applied discourse that establishes the “Third world”, the specific self-presentation referred to above is particularly problematic. Consequently, in recent decades, feminists have tended to analyze gender in conjunction with, and not in separation of, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality orientation, and have outlined that separation based on these differences needs to be comprehended and theorized to preclude essentialist generalizations about “women’s problems” (hooks, 1981). The feminist critique of gender essentialism does not merely charge that essentialist claims about women are over-generalizations, but also points out that these generalizations are hegemonic and signify the problems of privileged women (most often white, Western, middle-class heterosexual women) as exemplary “women’s issues” (after Narayan, 1998). This analysis results in theoretical perspectives and political agendas that obliterate the problems, perspectives, and political concerns of many women who are marginalized in terms of their identity. Women’s subordination and their confinement to domestic roles and the private sphere can constitute other sticky generalizations if the links between femininity and the private sphere are studied in exclusion of particular historical contexts.

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Thus, while the ideology of domesticity may have confined many middleclass women in the home, it has also approved the economic exploitation of women whose most pressing problems have not stemmed from their confinement to the private sphere (Narayan, 2000). With the following example, I establish the danger of ignoring historical and cultural manifestations and the prejudice in any over-generalization of Adivasi women as primitive or backward or being oppressed by social mechanisms. The invisibility of Adivasi women was thus a matter not so much of fact but of an androcentric perspective that misrepresented the alleged competencies of women and men in complex ways. This is evident of a historiography of resistance movements that subsumed women under the category of man, thereby ensuring their invisibility and producing the myth of women’s passivity. It gave rise to a belief that men alone were capable of retaliation, of leadership, and of changing the course of events, or making history, and women were not! However, scholarship on movements has shown the pivotal roles played by women in a variety of environmental and social movements-from-below, such as Chipko, Warli, Bishnoi, Naxalbari, and Narmada movements, to mention a few. The sporadic mentions, casual remarks, writings, folk tales, songs and poems, and colonial and historical anecdotes provide clues to the militancy and valor demonstrated by activist women in their fight against societal injustice and oppression (Saldanha, 1986). Most of these rebel women are ordinary rural residents, housewives, single mothers, and/or youths. It is noteworthy that the Adivasi community had historically positioned their women in a higher place than did the more “civilized” mainstream (caste Hindu) societies. For instance, the Mandla Gond women were “the real rulers of the house”. As for the Baigas: […] woman generally chooses her husband and changes him at will; she may dance in public; she may take her wares to the bazaar and open her own shop … she may drink or smoke in her husband’s presence. (Elwin, 1943, 18–19) She was not subjected to early childbearing; she was married when she was mature; if the marriage was a failure, she had the right of divorce; if her husband died, she could remarry, and she could inherit property. As a companion she is humorous and interesting; as a wife devoted; as a mother, heroic in the service of her children – freedoms all generally denied to caste Hindu women’. (Dube, 1964, 134–136)

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Prior to the construction of the SSP and ensuing dislocation, Adivasi practice tended to affirm a specific position for women that made them socially and economically autonomous. In Europe, sex was regarded as the man’s privilege and woman’s duty, whereas among the Adivasis, sex was more often a man’s obligation but a woman’s right (Chattopadhyay, 2014; Guha, 1996). Verrier Elwin (1902–1964), a British Christian missionary and writer who was inspired by Gandhism, took his mission to the Adivasi Gonds with the assumption that Gonds had “all to learn”. Ironically, while “educating the Gonds regarding their health needs and incorporating temperance, Elwin’s Gandhian principles and catholic ideologies were put to the test as he absorbed the Adivasi women’s gaiety and zest for life” (Chattopadhyay, 2014; Guha, 1996). However, these representations of women can be overturned if the Adivasi women’s aspirations for and actualizations of freedom are taken into consideration; their free lives fully realized feminism. Western scholarly writings on knowledge have generated a highly abstract language complex for Southern women scholars and activists. This language complex is, therefore, a significant tool to deconstruct the geographically situated and historically shaped post-colonial women. Feminist scholars have involved politics in their scholarship by challenging existing academic norms and by encouraging social transformation through field research (Rose, 1993). In this respect, Nagar and Geiger (1997, 2) aptly raise the following question: “How can feminists use fieldwork to produce knowledge across multiple divides (of power, geopolitical and institutional locations and axes of difference)”, and in what ways does their knowledge consider the everyday challenges of the marginalized? Nagar (1997, 183) reflects on the manner in which her choices regarding her theoretical arguments were connected to her accountability and commitments in transnational feminist praxis (Nagar, 1997, 183). Supplementing this discussion, I would add that often Southern feminists/scholars ask Northern academics why versions of theory are written in highly abstract language that separate them, does not resonate with them, and is totally “inaccessible and irrelevant” to them (Nagar, 1997, 179; see Chapter 1), and are contained within Western scholarly circles, thereby limiting the theoretical knowledge to diffuse (see Chapter 1). Thus, Wole Soyinka (in Tiffin, 1991, xiv; Raghuram & Madge, 2006, 280) laments:

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We have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonialism – this time by a universal – humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the appreciation of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their values.

Raghuram (2007) fittingly notes that destabilizing the locus of theory is urgent in feminist research, scope, and analysis in the post-colonial world or among Southern geographers working in the West. I would add that this re-working of theory is relevant to identify and differentiate historically and socially specific knowledge within the (Western) feminist circles. If we are to have feminist research focusing on a “polyvocal we”, we need to think of methods which problematize theorization and make transparent both its context and the scope of its effects (Raghuram, 2007). Following the conceptualizations of Mohanty (1988), Raghuram (2007), Narayan (1998, 2000), and Nagar (1997, 2002), it is relevant and timely to establish “Third World” theorizations. We should not only recognize the current geographical and historical embeddedness and scope of theory but also identify and acknowledge how theorization includes people differently in various parts of the (post)colonial world (Raghuram, 2007; Sheppard & Nagar, 2004). For instance: I had come from India to the United States with the intention of learning development theory and conducting my research on development, gender, power and discourse in India. Often students/scholars from the developing world travel to the developed world to learn how to conduct development research, making their home countries sites to conduct their surveys. Rarely does this happen the other way around. The language of development is delimited to certain sites while some people are positioned as ‘developers’. These demarcations affect who does development research, and where (Raghuram and Madge 2006). I have, after the fact, asked myself why academic politics use places in the south as empirical sites, and as sites for applying theory (which has been developed in the West) and not as sites that can generate their own abstractions. I am also unclear about how my work would have been recognized had I completed my doctoral dissertation on development in India. From this viewpoint, I state that destabilizing the power in constructing theory would promote further research on finding points of theoretical intersections – commonalities between certain theoretical accounts – and produce dialogic versions

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of knowledge in theoretical languages that would narrate people’s stories ‘here’ and ‘there’.17 (Chattopadhyay, 2014)

Primitive accumulation through dams has opened a portal that makes the local vulnerable to market dynamics. The continuous processes of wealth accumulation and appropriation of nature are not unique to the capitalist states or to multi-lateral agencies, corporations, or state apparatuses; it also enforces profound transitions in real people’s daily practices, norms, and relations, thereby completely dismantling their lives and their surroundings. The physical bodies of dam displacees are made expendable and exploitable by development planners, politicians, and policy makers. As such, all the people (e.g., the Indigenous people of the valley) who occupy and thrive on the primary economic sector are “freed” from their former livelihoods so they can supply the labor needed in the capitalist industrial complex. As they become alienated from their production bases, customs, traditions, knowledge, skills, histories, and productive capacities, they are completely dominated by the capitalist imperatives. Their labor, bodies, and minds are severed from those of social reproduction and maintenance of their community identity. Under conditions of increasing commodification of the peasant economy, the household is not a simple conglomerate of individuals securing livelihood from same subsistence and commodity base. Rather, members of the same household undertake various gender-specific activities. Villagers maximize every resource to survive; in most households, at least, one member works in the city to make an extra income. Women who are single, not married, divorced or separated, and widowed are acutely impoverished. Every failure in reaching a target crop productivity translates to borrowing money with high interest rates from lenders or large farmers. Many times, those who sell seeds rent out large farming machineries and lend money. 17 Reflexivity is often based on the essence of becoming a “transparent” researcher through thorough scrutiny of the researcher–researched relationship, based on their identities which are seldom generated. Having said that I would add that there is a gap in qualitative research is created by the lack of analysis of reflexivity as a relative process, dealt differently by scholars of different identities, by the ontology, methodology and theory of particular research, and by the context- and historical-specificity of that research. In addition, researchers’ priorities to “institutional, geopolitical and material aspects of their positionality”, as well as to the geographical and political situation of the researched (Nagar, 2002, 182), are add to the discussions on reflexivity. Moreover, identity-based reflexivity necessitates that the categories and labels of researchers be uncovered, and this requirement needs to be challenged.

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Many indebted farmers are effectively indentured laborer on larger farms for life. The economic freedom of women has been vastly reduced, while male household heads are struggling to make ends meet. Considering the massive changes India has experienced and continues to experience from tropical storms, the coronavirus, economic neoliberalization, Hindu fundamentalist18 onslaught, I am not optimistic about the economic success or the socioeconomic well-being of dislocated villagers in the Narmada River valley. “Accumulation by dispossession” or “accumulation by encroachment”19 has improved living conditions of the wealthy villagers but destabilized many villagers who were living sustainably or barely surviving prior to the arrival of large-scale development. Throughout the stresses and incongruities of various stages of capitalism, capitalists seek a “spatial fix” by exporting resources and labor from the peripheries of the global development footprint, thereby accumulating wealth at the expenses of the poor. I end in anguish, reflecting on (1) the linkages across imperialism, neoliberalism, and globalization as they lead to a settler colonial phenomenon in many places in the Global South; and (2) arguing that though patriarchy was not deeply entrenched among the Adivasi and Dalit women and men but was aggravated during colonialism and capitalism (Harvey, 2003; Patnaik, 1995; Whitehead, 2010). On this note, I have so many questions still unanswered! When a dam is developed, what is the extent of transformation on community activities, practices, relationships, and roles of individuals? For policy makers are gender, ethnicity, race, and class mere factors in an equation to measure economic growth? In policy reports, where are the debates on autonomy and freedom of the Adivasi women? Alternatively, if there is a substitute to understanding economic development following the Indigenous

18 Baviskar (2005) explains the vicious construction of a power-knowledge dichotomy by the Hindu fundamentalist political party known as Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). BJP is not apparently combating Adivasi exclusion by Hinduizing them but building a reserve of marginalized tribes to meet their political ends of cleansing other religious minorities. The Hindutva ideology very significantly constructs a particular discourse on Hinduism that is producing a specific knowledge that cannot be presupposed or generated without power (Foucault, 1979). 19 According to Patnaik (1995) accumulation by encroachment as analytically different from accumulation by expansion. Accumulation by encroachment is a useful concept as it links to the current phase of globalization through the privatization of state assets and common property resources.

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lens, lives, and practices? Are women’s voices counted on the disruption of development projects? This research was intellectually stimulating and exciting endeavor that helped me experience personally the ways in which large development projects impact—and continue to impact— people and their surrounding beyond restoration. Although writing about them could be seen as a sheer academic exercise and my position as a privileged scholar far removed from the agony of the Sardar Sarovar project affected people, but through this book the stories of dislocated and dispossessed villagers were made known and so was their struggles, emotions, and sufferings. In this context, these are the people who have endured perils of forced resettlement in unknown habitats, sometimes far from their networks and communities, often with minimal resources and without knowledge of their social or economic futures. These are also the people whose autonomy and agency define free will and self-governance. These are the people who exhibit tremendous courage, strength, and hope to find possibilities to make their future work, for which they have long waited.

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Glossary of Adivasi and Hindi Words

Adivasis: tribals Baandh: dam Bachao: save Baigas: tribals who practiced jhum cultivation Banega: construction Bazaaria: urban intelligentsia Bhagat: Tadvis who abstained drinking and eating meat Bhil, Ratwa, Tadvi: names of tribal communities Chaumasa: monsoon Gaon: village Haats: markets Hamara: our Indaal: worship of land and rain Jal: water Jamin: lands Jan andolaan: people’s movement Jiji: sister Kanbi Patridars: wealthy plain cultivators settled in Shahada and Taloda districts of Madhya Pradesh Karaba: common land Kata ni jamin: legal lands Levi Patridars: wealthy plain cultivators settled in Jhalod district of Madhya Pradesh © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4

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GLOSSARY OF ADIVASI AND HINDI WORDS

Mata: mother Nahin: no Nimaris or Nimadis: plain dwellers, mostly referred to the wealthy cultivators Non-bhagats: Tadvis who continue to follow the traditional food habits and lifestyles. Raj: rule Samarpan: offer Sampriti dal: drowning squad Sangharsha: protest Sarpanj: village head or chief Vadgam, Katnera, Alirajpur, Kundiuchakalam, Suryatalav, Sanoli and Golagambdi: names of villages of Gujarat, Maharashtra Vahini: work-force Vanias: money lenders Yatra: journey

Index

A Abstract space, 25, 103, 104 Accumulation, 4, 5, 23–25, 31, 44–46, 86, 104, 124, 131–133, 140 Accumulation by dispossession, 8, 23, 24, 31, 141 Adivasis , 2, 25, 32, 34–36, 38–42, 45, 109–118 original settlers, 5–11, 15–20 Agamben, G., 103 Agarwal, A., 7, 45, 98 Agency, 2–11, 15–20, 110, 142 Alternative to development alternative development, 17, 118 Autoethnography, 2, 36 Autonomy, 5, 10, 15–20, 45, 46, 61, 87, 110, 118 B Baigas , 39, 137 Bare Body, 38, 52, 64, 103, 104 Baviskar, A., 2, 3, 24, 33, 43–46, 54, 105, 109–114

Bhil , 2–11, 56–87, 113 Biopower, 3, 9, 103, 132 Bodies, 132–134 bodily functions, 105 body control, 134 body order, 134 Butler, J., 4, 6, 103

C Capitalism, 3, 18, 24, 31, 40, 44, 131–142 Caste, 7, 19, 33, 54, 56, 59–87, 111, 137 Castree, N., 24 Cernea, M., 5, 42, 125, 127 Civilization, 33, 54, 55 Colonial bureaucracy, 2–11 Colonialism, 2–11, 40, 102–104, 139, 141 Coloniality, 2–11 Commodification of Nature, 4, 23–36, 42–46, 93, 102 Commoning, 31

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2022 S. Chattopadhyay, Politics of Development and Forced Mobility, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93901-4

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156

INDEX

Commons, 18, 31, 32, 34, 44, 53, 54, 87, 88, 98, 108, 125, 126, 132 Conservation, 23–46 Counter-discourse, 7, 108 Critique of Modernity, 32–36, 110

D Dalit, 10, 64, 141 De Certeau, M., 39, 97, 116, 117 Development politics, 16–20, 27 Discourse, 4, 16, 18, 32, 100–108 Discourses of power, 3, 104 Dislocation, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 37, 101, 102, 104, 108, 116, 124, 127 Dispossessed, 4–9, 104, 142 Dwivedi, R., 54, 114, 118, 126

E Ecology, 23–33, 45, 125 Economic development, 7, 16, 42, 53, 141 Eminent Domain, 26, 42, 43, 125 Enclosures, 52–56, 132 Environment, 17, 32–41 Environmental changes, 15 Environmental degradation, 27 Environmentalism, 33, 100 Environmental of the poor, 52, 53 ecosystem people, 53 Escobar, A., 9, 29, 98 Esteva, G., 9, 17 Extractive capitalism, 3

F Feminism, 20, 124, 132–138 Feminist analysis, 20 Ferguson, J., 16 Forestry, 2, 10, 23–46, 57, 99, 132 Forests, 7, 10, 23–46, 57, 99

G Gadgil, M., 5, 8, 9, 34, 38, 57, 98 Globalization, 3, 31, 45, 103, 129 Global South, 3, 7, 32, 124, 129 Gonds, 138 Gramsci, A., 33, 97, 98 Guha, R., 5–9, 30–45, 99, 138 H Harvey, D., 8, 24, 44, 45, 132 Hegemony, 98 hidden transcript , 129 Hindutva, 64, 141 Hindutvaization of Adivasis, 59 Homo sacer, 103 Hunting gathering, 32–43 I Indigenous, 2, 7 Indigenous Feminism, 19 Involuntary migration, 2 J Jhum cultivation, 35–39 K Knowledge, 88 L Land, 2, 23–46 Land Acquisition Act, 42 Land conflicts, 2 Lefebvre, H., 19 Livelihood, 37, 38 Luxemburg, R., 8 M Marx, K., 24, 25

INDEX

Massey, D., 19 Modernity, 9, 17, 33, 110 Mohanty, C., 134, 135, 139 Morgensen, S., 3, 9 Multiple Action Research Group (MARG), 101

N Narmada river, 2, 5, 98, 125, 141 Narratives, 58, 59, 68, 84, 87 Nature, 23–46 NBA (Narmada Bachao Andolon), 109–118 Neoliberalism, 3, 5

O O’Connor, J., 24, 44

P Patkar, M., 109–118 Patriarchy, 6, 20, 35, 83, 131, 132, 135, 141 Potter, R., 26 Power, 39, 42, 46, 53, 61–64, 97–117 Preservation, 23–46 Primitive accumulation, 31, 44, 45, 132, 140 Privilege, 4, 18, 26, 38, 88, 100, 136–142 Project affected populations (PAPs), 5, 16, 106

R Ratwa, 2, 57 Reflexivity, 36, 140 Reserve Army of Labor, 18 Resettlers, 2

157

resettlement, 5, 16, 27, 46, 58, 102, 105–107, 109, 115, 117, 123–127 Resistance, 93, 97–118, 124 march, 111, 113, 116 protests, 5, 99, 106, 111, 113, 115 struggles, 100, 102, 106, 108, 110, 116 Risks, 106–108

S Said, E., 4 Saldanha, I., 20 Scott, J., 29, 39, 40, 55, 97, 114, 117, 129 Settler colonialism, 3, 8, 9, 104, 141 Shifting Cultivation, 34–39 Shiva, V., 33, 43, 53 Simpson, L., 4, 5 Sivaramakrishnan, K., 7, 27–29, 43, 98, 132 Skaria, A., 54, 61 Slash and Burn Cultivation, 33–35 Snowball sampling, 58 Social movements, 97–118, 124, 137 Social or Scientific Forestry, 10, 23–46, 134 Social reproduction, 131, 132, 140 Social transformations, 5, 52, 124, 138 Space, 25, 28, 74, 102, 103 Spatial, 25, 27, 73, 74, 77, 130 Stories, 59, 85, 123, 124 Story telling, 19 Strategies, 97–118 Subordination, 40–46 Sundar, N., 9, 40, 44 Surplus Labor, 18 Survival, 38 Sustainability, 112 unsustainability, 110

158

INDEX

T Tactics, 38, 39, 102, 103, 105, 108, 111, 112, 116 Tadvi, 2, 17 Terra Nullius, 26 Third World, 17, 100, 135, 136, 139 Third world subject, 124, 136 Third world women, 18, 135 Trusteeship, 26

W Warli, 4 Western environmentalism, 33 Whitehead, J., 2–11, 25, 26, 58, 123, 141 Witch, 61 Witch hunting, 44, 132 World Bank, 8, 16, 44, 106, 127