Paper short abstract

The paper shows how the extraction of value in the Indian steel industry is entrenched with the casteification of ‘Adivasi’ smallholders and labour, how this has changed over time since the inception of the industry, and what this dynamic entails for the analysis of ‘racial/ casteified capitalism’.

Paper long abstract

The ethnographic case discussed in this paper draws on extensive fieldwork in a steel town and its surroundings in the eastern Indian state Odisha. The town and its large public-sector steel plant have come into existence in the 1950s, in the wake of early independent India’s attempt at import-substituting industrialization, around which several other public or private steel industries have mushroomed, especially since the 2000s after India had turned to economic liberalization. In this paper, I delineate how the steel industry extracts value from the dispossession of smallholders as well as the exploitation of labour identified since 19th century British colonialism as ‘tribal’, ‘indigenous’ or ‘Adivasi’, and how the latter Adivasis attempt to contest it. I further show how the way this is done has changed over time, and how this reflects wider structural changes in the local regime of production and in the regional political economy, thus revealing the historical particular dynamic of casteification in eastern India’s steel industry.