Orchestrating Anti-Dispossession Politics: Caste and Movement Leadership in Rural West Bengal

ABSTRACT

This article uses the concepts of orchestration and spectacle to analyse the work of leaders of an anti-dispossession movement in rural West Bengal. It examines what being a movement leader entails and argues for the importance of connections and social relations in the production of both movement leadership and movement spectacles. By introducing a Dalit perspective on a movement that was otherwise led by the local middle-caste peasantry, the article shows how local caste and class relations have been important in defining access to positions of movement leadership; in disconnecting specific Dalit interests from the movement’s larger political agenda; and in giving rise to certain forms of internal policing of caste boundaries within the movement. The fact that the ability to cultivate and “connect” to the new political spaces opened by the anti-dispossession movement correlates strongly with historically produced caste and class inequalities calls for greater attention to the internal caste politics of anti-dispossession movements.

KEY WORDS:

• Land dispossession
• caste
• dalits
• land wars
• Singur
• India

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the following for constructive input: Siddharth Sareen, Patrik Oskarsson, Guro W. Samuelsen, Alf G. Nilsen, Lisa Björkman, Kevin Hewison, the Oslo South Asia Symposium, the members of the “dependency” research group at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, and the Journal of Contemporary Asia’s anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While the Indian land grab (see Sud 2009; Basu 2007) may not be of quite the same magnitude as that in Latin America and Africa (Borras Jr et al. 2012), the general tendency is clear enough.

2. As Mosse (2018) has recently reminded us, current economic and political forces have – somewhat paradoxically – simultaneously weakened and revived caste in ways that defy easy generalisation.

3. This section builds on Nielsen (2016b; 2016c).

4. This stereotyping and the core-periphery movement structure it gave rise to echoes the bhadralok-chhotolok distinction, the social distinction between genteel people and “small people” that to a large extent represents the traditional caste stratification in rural West Bengal (Roy 2014, 200).

5. While it may be argued that the MKP activists were instrumental in mobilising the Bauri behind the SABKMS, it is more accurate to see them as performing the kind of catalytic work that enables rather than creates new forms of subaltern mobilisation (Nilsen 2010, 63–68).

6. The Singur movement had led to improvements in Ajay’s life as more resources were now channelled towards Nadipara by the local gram panchayat that was now controlled by erstwhile movement activists and supporters.