Paper Short Abstract:

The paper rethinks ecological crises that allegedly put to waste agricultural land and instead argues for the generative capacity of devastating events such as floods and/or erosion in sustaining the lives of riverine dwellers within the mechanisms of capital accumulation.

Paper Abstract:

The paper is an ethnographic account of the hydraulic life worlds of communities living on sandbanks (chars). These islands emerge and disappear as the river Ganges accretes and erodes on the floodplains of deltaic India. Nirmal Char, the site of my fieldwork, emerged from the ecological destruction unleashed by the Farakka barrage (1998-2000) and is considered ruined and ready to be abandoned by those who can. I examine the discourses around devastation to argue that riverine communities live fluid lives— betwixt and between modernity and its failure. The paper draws attention to the everyday lives of char dwellers, focusing on the entanglements of the human and the river in both its promises and uncertainties. Fertile and fecund, the fluvial landscape, far from being wastelands, produces rich agricultural crops dependent on flood and silt accumulation. Examining the meanings attached to the river, seen at once as life-taking as it is life-making, with its repeated erosion and sedimentation, I argue that the devastating events can be equally generative. Hydraulic worlds, made and unmade by water in their surging and receding, can become sites of capital accumulation by providing footloose and precarious labour for diverse service economies in the urban and, secondly, generating myriad livelihood strategies on the chars which sustain this labour migration. In this paper, as much as I affirm the destruction of the climate crisis, I also argue for the importance of so-called devastating incidents such as erosions and floods that make riverine lives liveable.