Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper will enable one to understand char-dwellers’ relational and fluvial world through the ethnographic object of the boat, how such a world is changing because of a land favoring state’s neglect of boats and yet how the mobile char-dwellers are challenging such a fixity obsessed state.

Paper long abstract

This paper looks at boats as an ethnographic object in riverine char-lands of western Assam to understand how state interventions (or non-intervention) have changed char-dwellers’ fluvial identity, memories and relations. It looks at the lifeworld of boats as an affective reality – how these boats have allowed char-dwellers to traditionally remain mobile, fluid, historically migrating across state fixed borders by following connected river-routes, access fluvial spaces and shape their socio-cultural identities as more relational, entangled and syncretic. Boats keep alive the rhizomatic fluidity of char-dwellers as a cultural and political community as they battle with a land favoring fixity-obsessed majoritarian state. The colonial politics of favoring land over water wherein land was not simply seen as having economic value, but also recognized as a cultural and ideological category, through which civilization was furthered is forwarded by the post-independent majoritarian state too. Consequently, relations of fluidity defining char-dwellers’ socio-political world are being slowly replaced by relations of precarity, fixity, revenue generation and criminality.

Finally, by looking at boats, I understand how the water-dependent, mobile char-dwellers are challenging such a land-favoring state and creating spaces of co-existence by establishing the state as affective. I argue ‘Affective state’ as one that is rhizomatic and allows the flow of understanding between the state and char-dwellers opening up spaces of co-existence, of fluidity. The paper largely explores what can mobile objects, used by migratory communities living in fluvial ecologies, teach us about identity, belongingness, state-society relations, human-non-human entanglements, nature of state among others?