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Paper short abstract

This paper examines existential mobility and suspended legality in Western Assam's river islands (chars), showing how recurrent displacement, bureaucratic waiting, and fragile dreams of home produce co-existing mobility and immobility under unequal regimes of land and citizenship.

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 regimes of citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Miya char dwelllers alongside archival research in colonial maps, survey reports, and administrative records, the paper explores how existential mobility is shaped, constrained, and deferred by regimes of land and legality. 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 administrative and citizenship verification procedures that demand documentary stability from landscapes and lives shaped by flux. I argue that char dwellers' life projetcs are animated by fragile yet persistent dreams of boshot bāri (home) and sukh-shanti (peaceful dwelling), imaginaries which are sustained through affective, material, and bureaucratic labour that involves constant moving, rebuilding, testifying, and waiting. What emerges is a condition of suspended legality, in which repeated attempts at arrival generate prolonged temporal and political immobility. By foregrounding waiting and the labour of hope, the paper reframes displacement as an enduring configuration of (im)mobilities rather than a discrete event.