Presentation short abstract

Chars (shifting riverine islands) in the Brahmaputra River are shaped by hydrosocial interventions that displace communities and dismantle indigenous ways of living with the river. This paper foregrounds subaltern knowledge and “settling-on-the-move” as climate-resilient alternative.

Presentation long abstract

The paper situates the Brahmaputra floodplains in Assam (India) as fluid territories where infrastructures, mapping regimes, and development discourses operate as instruments of state-making, ideological control, and contested development. State-led infrastructure projects displace riverine communities and erode vernacular ecologies, amplifying the socio-cultural othering of Bengali Muslims amid Assam's identity politics and India's rising authoritarianism. A dialectic emerges between two river ontologies: one based on taming nature through technocratic ‘risk fixes’ and the other grounded in adaptation and cohabitation with flooding, erosion and accretion.

This paper explores how eco-hydrologically insensitive governance and disaster management heighten exposure to hazards while delegitimizing amphibious livelihoods in the chars (shifting riverine islands) of the Brahmaputra River. In response, it proposes ‘settling-on-the-move’ as a critical design and policy heuristic that acknowledges the riverine communities’ situated expertise through seasonal mobility, amphibious land-use, and flexible tenure/rights. Drawing on fieldwork and interpretative mapping, it documents alternative knowledge systems and traces subaltern strategies of resistance that sustain ecological autonomy under conditions of surveillance, cartographic enclosure, and climate volatility.

Historically central to Assam’s agricultural economy and a refuge for Bengali Muslim communities, chars invite contemplation of alternative realities and narratives that envision char-scapes as uncharted territories, retaining the freedom that their inherent illegibility offers. By articulating a repertoire of grounded practices through which subaltern actors reconfigure hydrosocial territories and counter-mapping methods, the paper contributes to debates on river management, state control and subaltern resistance to inspire alternative development policies and climate adaptation strategies in other parts of South Asia.