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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how, in the river islands of Western Assam, riverine displacement enforces repeated mobility, while land and citizenship regimes defer arrival through bureaucratic waiting. It argues that mobility and immobility are co-produced through suspended legality as a mode of governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines mobility and immobility as co-produced conditions in the shifting river islands (chars) of Western Assam, where the movements of the Brahmaputra intersect with colonial land-making, postcolonial bureaucracy, and contemporary politics of citizenship. Combining ethnographic fieldwork among char dwellers with archival research in colonial maps, survey reports, and police records, the paper traces the colonial genealogies of wasteland discourse, settlement schemes, and surveillance to show how contemporary regimes of land and illegality actively produce immobility and defer arrival through the governance of mobility.

Annual floods and river erosion compel recurrent spatial mobility, forcing people to relocate homes, livelihoods, and social worlds. Yet these movements rarely culminate in arrival as legal settlement or recognition. Instead, mobility is accompanied by forms of immobility produced through land administration, revenue regimes, and citizenship verification, which demand documentary stability from landscapes and lives shaped by flux. While files, maps, surveys, and registers promise recognition and entitlement, they draw people into endless bureaucratic circulation. As the river repeatedly unsettles land, boundaries, and identity, people circulate between chars, offices, tribunals, and witnesses, without these movements solidifying into legal recognition or arrival. Mobility thus generates immobility, while waiting emerges as a central modality of governance, producing temporal immobility amid spatial motion. I conceptualize this condition as suspended legality: a mode of governance in which people are held in prolonged temporal and political immobility despite repeated attempts at arrival. In doing so, the paper reframes displacement as an enduring configuration of (im)mobilities rather than a discrete event.