Disaster, appropriation, and displacement in the Indian Sundarbans

Abstract

How do we understand a disaster? How do we interpret the aftermath of a disaster, anyway? This article draws on my ethnographic fieldwork to understand what constitutes a disaster and how preexisting social conditions shaped events in the wake of Cyclone Aila in South Asia in May 2009. The people who received relief following this disaster engaged in discrimination, something that has become palpable through the frame of disaster. At the same instant, multiple forms of power at different levels materialised; aware of the dynamics of the crisis, actors have strategically used the disaster to strengthen their positions in the name of ‘building back better’. I show how these phenomena are linked with the consequences of disaster. The paper explains how people's attitudes towards the state and vice versa shape patterns of land use and forms of resource extraction, thereby intensifying resource-related hazards in the hinterlands of the Indian Sundarbans.