Arnab Roy Chowdhury

Deluge amidst conflict: Hydropower development and displacement in the North-east region of India

In recent years, there has been a surge in hydropower projects in the North-east part of India, constructed under the aegis of the national state. Foregrounding this fact, our article conceptualizes North-east India as a ‘region’ that is not only physiographic in nature but also discursively constructed by history, culture and politics, in the colonial and postcolonial times. We argue that when large developmental projects such as hydropower projects are commissioned in this messy context of the North-eastern region in India, it gives rise to myriad problems of ethnic strife, cultural identity and indigenous rights that reflect a ‘regional pattern’. In tandem with these various dispossessions brought about by such developmental projects, there is a slowly emerging political consciousness at the regional level to counter these developmental projects. This is still in a very burgeoning stage. In this article, we have envisioned such a regional level collaboration among various ethnic identity based mobilizations, as a counterpart of civil society. Such an ethnic alliance is an imperative, to balance the ‘excesses’ of the ‘sovereign nation state’ and its notion of ‘development’.

‘Repertoires of Contention’ in Movements Against Hydropower Projects in India

Applying Charles Tillys notion of ‘repertoires of contention’, this paper discusses strategies and modes of protest carried out by the movements against hydropower projects in India. It compares the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save Narmada Movement) in Madhya Pradesh and the Shramik Mukthi Dal (SMD; Labour Liberation Party) led mobilisations against hydropower projects in Maharashtra. It explains the more dramatic repertoires deployed by NBA as opposed to moderate and pragmatic movement repertoires of SMD. The paper concludes that the differences in ideology, organisation and cultural–historical legacy of the two organisations, as well as their different modes of interaction with the state, are the causes behind different contentious repertoires deployed by them, which resulted in different trajectories and outcomes.

State Formation from Below: Social Movements of Dam Evictees and Legal Transformation of the Local State in India, 1960–76

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates a case of state formation in South Asia that emerged from below. In India, the state of Maharashtra has had a history of social movements by people evicted by dam construction dating back to the 1920s. The cumulative effect of these movements led Maharashtra to enact a law in 1976 to empower dam evictees, thus establishing the first rehabilitation law in India. These movements democratised the state and transformed its legal arena through a rights-based, claim-making approach. I argue that in post-colonial India, the state and society co-evolved through dialectics that were instrumental in transforming both, and that the making of the Maharashtra Resettlement of Project Displaced Persons Act, 1976, was the precursor to all acts subsequently passed in India in response to a rights-based, claim-making approach.This paper demonstrates a case of state formation in South Asia that emerged from below. In India, the state of Maharashtra has had a history of social movements by people evicted by dam constructi...

‘Revisiting Naxalbari’: Narratives of Violence and Exclusions from the Marginal Spaces

This chapter is not a dominant hegemonic narrative or official history of the Naxalbari movements (1967) in Bengal; rather, it is a cultural-historical re-examination of various kinds of marginal spaces of exclusion that the movement created. In this paper, I revisit the movement events to unravel certain hidden, subtle as well as overt layers of violence and exclusions that were created during the movements mostly against the indigenous tribal participants. This paper demonstrates how the state, the Bengali bhadralok and the vanguard revolutionary party CPI (M–L) and its youth followers, manufactured a maze of symbolic and real, violent and exclusionary practices that sabotaged a movement originally initiated by the tribes, and changed its ‘meaning’ through ‘cultural-ideological’ masquerade known as hegemony.

In the Realm of the Diamond King: Myth, Magic, and Modernity in the Diamond Tracts of Central India

From being “the cradle” of raw diamonds in the world in the eighteenth century, India has turned into an insignificant producer of rough diamonds today. Yet, even now, the indigenous Gonds mine diamonds artisanally in a remote location in central India, largely hidden away from public vision. This article presents an exposition of artisanal diamond mining in central India from the humanistic tradition in geography to illuminate the “realm” of the Gonds, where magic and social relations rule imaginaries of the diamonds in the particular place. It argues that the imaginations of diamonds and their mining by indigenous miners in Panna are shaped through the prism of their particular regional history, myth, geography, and culture. Without faith in the restrictive authority of science, capital, and state, and refusing domestication, the miners dig, smuggle, and spend for the savoir vivre. They remain dynamic and rely on traditional ideas of luck, masculinity, and success. They bind themselves to work and to each other in ways that preclude the possibility of amassing wealth and direct wealth in ways that reaffirm their dependence on the miners life. The argument is illustrated through the story of protagonist Ramu, who proudly spends the earnings from his big diamond find. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Panna, Madhya Pradesh State in central India, this article explores the magic of artisanal diamond mining, shows how place shapes such mining, and shows how informal mining shapes the context.