Vernacular Modernity: The politics of the Project-Affected people in rural western India

Abstract

This paper uses ethnographic fieldwork and archival records concerning seven government projects, large dams and protected areas, to study the successful mobilization by thousands of rural lower caste and other marginal groups in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Led by their organic leaders, they first formulated and repeatedly reshaped a state policy of resettlement for project affected people due to development schemes and other state ventures since 1976, and have ensured its implementation in rural settings for nearly five decades. The paper argues that the politics and worldview of these project-affected persons, mostly illiterate and others with some education, reflects a phenomenon that I term vernacular modernity with roots in the lower-caste cultural revolt from the early colonial period that adapted the European enlightenment discourse to the local setting for questioning existing sociopolitical inequalities. Generations of left leaders thereafter have been constructively reconfiguring the contours of modernity, development, democracy and state-making at the margins along with many community leaders who have been shaping their own resettlement as a state infrastructure project. The paper also highlights the political economy of state projects and the challenges concerning forced resettlement processes including shrinking land holdings, a lackadaisical state machinery, host–guest conflicts in the new setting and related issues. This exploratory work tries to strike a conversation between two disparate sets of literature in critical social science concerning protected areas and infrastructure while it offers a fresh empirical perspective on modernity and subaltern politics in rural India.