Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how the historically autonomous tribal region of Dang, Gujarat, is reshaped under the Forest Rights Act (2006). It shows how evidence, mapping, and long wait produce legal subjects and change relations with the forest, while creating friction as older sense of being persists.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the transformation of forest relations in Dang district, Gujarat, following the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006. Historically governed by Bhil kings and shaped through affective, embodied interactions with the forest, the Dangi landscape was a space of autonomy, movement, and relational belonging. Colonial and post-colonial interventions disrupted these dynamics, imposing legal-bureaucratic control. While framed as corrective, the FRA paradoxically reproduces many of the logics it seeks to undo.

Based on qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted between Sept-Dec 2024, the paper draws on Peluso and Vandergeest to approach the Dangi forest as a political forest—a space produced through projects of governance that determine who belongs, who controls land, and what counts as legitimate practice. In the Dang, under the FRA, this production unfolds through evidentiary requirements, documentary inscription, cartographic techniques, and the prolonged waiting embedded in the process. Together, these practices work to (re)territorialise the landscape by transforming lived, relational spaces of belonging into administratively bounded units of governance, while simultaneously making the “forest-dweller” into a legally recognizable and governable subject. Yet this process is not seamless. The interplay of regulation and everyday life generates frictional co-production, reviving alternative claims to belonging and sovereignty.

By tracing how documentation, mapping, and waiting shape everyday life in Dang, the paper demonstrates that FRA 2006 restructures forest relations through a dynamic interplay of recognition and regulation. In doing so, it offers a grounded contribution to debates on political forests, Indigenous sovereignty, and postcolonial state formation.