Professor: Aditya Ghosh Name: Aditi Agrawal

Course: Land- Politics, Perceptions and Prejudices Student ID: 18080016

Date: 30th October 2020

Piece of Land or Peace on Land?

Land with its unnatural and ever-shifting linear divisions into global, national, community
and personal spaces exists and forms a part of the complex structure of hierarchy of power.
The physical constructions of control and the idea of ownership thus, created through our
cognitive perspective, practices its influence on the marginalised and creates geographical
and social boundaries of appropriation of “space” and “place”. The interface of divisions
between “commons” and “private (both by individuals and state)” where the populations in
the former commits to sustain the ecology, their collective practices and social, cultural and
political values and the latter exploits the land with its modernistic and “embodies the
essence of alienation” () elicit differences in the meanings associated with the single piece of
land. The further division of “commons” reflects the reinforced individualistic capitalist ideas
of owning a property and, hence legitimises the objective of control and forces reformation of
the values associated with land. Taking into account, this essay traces on how the socio-
economic and political processes practiced by the State officials have led to the divisions of
land. It is argued that these divisions force the displacement of the Tribal and Adivasi
Community from one piece of land to another and therefore, arrests their sense of
belongingness and values. With the aforementioned idea, the essay also focuses on the design
and the outline of the course manual in establishing an understanding of the argument.

The idea of alienating the meanings associated with the land from those who live on it is an
outcome of the discriminatory relations of neo-liberal approach practiced by the powerful on
the cognitive divisions created on land. The point becoming the reason of victim of the
violence from Nehruvian times to present- modernistic and industrialist visions are
interconnected with the location, the resources attached to the land and the social relations
which segregates the powerless from the eyes of the officials. The state and other proponents
consistently justify the act of individualism which displaces tribals from the standpoint of
sacrifice for the greater interest of the nation () which means “conquest of foreign lands,
establishing dominion over them, including them within one’s own territorial
realm”(Chatterjee, 2003) The emergence of the foreign capital and technology to explore and
accelerate economic growth have been implemented at the costs of massive displacements of
tribal population and by eliminating sustainable subsistence of agriculture of the community
who have been traditionally dependent upon their local ecosystems for survival. In the name
of infrastructural development these tribals lose their land not only to the project authorities
but also to the private enterprises. Their status changes from self-sustaining members of their
local ecosystem to local refugees who are forced to occupy another division of land of the
large urban centres and industrial towns or resource replenished areas. The capitalist
approach inevitably reduces the populations to a sub-human existence by destroying their
social organisation, cultural identity and resource base cumulatively making them vulnerable
and violating their dignity. Moreover, this “domination of external nature by the internal
nature exacts a cost” () where the “nature destroys its own conditions for continuation” () and
internal nature rebels psychically, spiritually, and bodily” (), thus destroying the symbiotic
relationship between the two. These interchanging meanings and associations caused by non-
physical divisions and re-divisions played by the power constructs “mental”, “social”,
“physical” and “environmental” instability and loss of sense of belongingness due to lack of
collective identity and further questions the concept of their citizenship.
The process of restructuring the non-physical divisions on land itself introduces the idea of
legal framework determining the individual ownership. The analytics of the government
processes legitimize the mechanisms of ownership encompassing such questions as to who
has the right to use the particular division of land, who exercises control and who has the
legal claims to certain portions of land. The particular bundle of rights differentially affects
the reference levels for the gains or losses over land. The constraints, conditions and
frameworks thus adopted by the government puts the tribal community at the state of
uncertainty and fades their spaces of participation. The tribals are in the situation where the
process of governance results them in the feeling of insecurity and deprives them of their
basic rights by the notion of illegality. The logic and legality over the land divisions formed
by the government and judicial branch leaves the tribals with no choice but to remain in the
shadows because notice invariably brings with it the desire to transform commons into state
property or capitalist commodity. Chatterjee here in his book “Politics of the Governed” says
“Rights belong to those who have proper legal title to the lands or buildings that the
authorities acquire; they are, we might say, proper citizens who must be paid the legally
stipulated compensation” (Chatterjee, Pg. 69) Once the legality and the ownership rights are
established, the spatial division and inconsideration about the lives of Tribals becomes an
important fact. That is to say, when legality is defined as a concept of boundary work and
shapes the discourse towards propertied citizenship, the sense of legal domains of rights and
exclusions stand at a higher level in comparison to the sentimental and psychological
entitlement.