Paper short abstract:

Environmentally displaced people with a colonial history of migration along the banks of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India, navigate various means for energy access. The politics and impacts of navigating services from state and non-state agencies is analysed through the lens of temporality.

Paper long abstract:

Material dispossession is a part of everyday life for people displaced by floods and riverbank erosion by the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. As state and non-state agencies address challenges of natural disasters, emphasis is placed on electricity access for internally displaced people. This raises questions about the politics and impacts of such efforts. What does it mean for environmental refugees to have access to infrastructure when they have to migrate every few years? How does electricity access mediate legitimacy in the eyes of the state? How do periods of infrastructure stability come to inhabit memories and aspirations?

In Tengaguri village, by the Brahmaputra, where seventy percent of the village has been lost to erosion, displaced people narrate stories of dispossession and repossession in a dynamic flux. Dispossession transitions from earlier legitimate grid connections to improvised illegitimate hooking of new electric poles at present. Further, access to solar powered technologies is limited; with access controlled by a dense web of bureaucracy and development aid. Here, the past, present, and the future take a non-linear form that defies the normative progression of access to technology, as prescribed in India’s energy policies.

Analyzing ethnographic material, including vignettes of oral and visual stories, gathered during a year-long fieldwork in Tengaguri, this paper discusses people’s interactions with electric materials at the margins of the state. Through recollection of the past, a narration of the present, and aspirations imagined for the future, I examine the politics and temporalities of electrical materiality of displaced people.