Presentation short abstract

A reconsideration of the politics of land and subject formation among descendants of refugee-settlers in the Andaman Islands, India, that shows how territorial regimes and state ownership of forested landscapes become hegemonic through everyday politics in the Indian nation-state.

Presentation long abstract

A crucial element of the ‘political’ in political forests is how territorial regimes defining boundaries of forest and agrarian land turn hegemonic. The case of descendants of agrarian refugee-settlers inhabiting the farm-forest frontier in North Andaman in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a territory of India in the Bay of Bengal, shows how territorial regimes gain popular legitimacy over time.

Refugee-settlers, who arrived in this region in the 1950s, and agrarian migrants who arrived here from the 1980s onwards, both lower caste Hindu migrants from present-day Bangladesh, have made North Andaman home. People from both groups made agricultural clearings in the northern forests, and descendants of both groups now compete to gain secure tenure for this land.

Descendants of refugee-settlers claim primary right to cultivated land in the forest by claiming they belong to North Andaman. Descendants of settlers’ claims though are not only moral and draw their legitimation from historical and ongoing processes of subject formation. After decades of contesting state territorial boundaries and schemes, when they now articulate their claims, they use terms that the state uses to define the landscape, and accept state-imposed boundaries of forest land.

Based in ethnographic fieldwork, my analysis of the history of subject formation amongst descendants of settlers as well as of the politics of land in North Andaman (Li 2007; Subramanian 2009; Hall, Hirsch and Li 2011), shows how state ownership of forested landscapes has become hegemonic in this region and how postcolonial territorial regimes are strengthened through everyday politics.