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Paper long abstract:

This paper posits the centrality of the dalaal (middleman) to the narratives, discourses, and practices of conjunctural resistance and acquiescence that underpin the landscape of coal. Noting the role of politics and discursive contestations in the creation of coal as a resource, this paper illustrates how dalit and adivasi dalaals mediate the construction of an agentic sociality at the frontiers of extraction, and are thus an immanent character in the repertoire of actionable agency at labour’s disposal to reconstitute the geography of capitalism. Thinking through dealmaking as a window into the dynamics of accumulation, extraction, and the life worlds of rurality allows us to foreground how internally variegated communities and actors dialectically constitute the landscape of coal. Drawing from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand, India, this paper shows how in opposition to readings of dalaali or brokerage as being reactionary and steeped in the logic of personal profit, the dalaals in my field of study who side with "The Company" see its entry into the region as marking a period of “political openness,” whereby class relations and contestations that were hitherto contingent upon the ownership and control over land may be reworked. The dalaal’s actions in the landscape of coal — a landscape that is at once inhabited by the past — are to be located, this paper argues, within a spatially, temporally, and morally negotiated flux: a state of constant in-between-ness in structurally contingent resistance and acquiescence that I call ‘the speculative liminalities of land’.