ABSTRACT
On the Wainganga River, the Gosikhurd dam led to the displacement and resettlement of 93 villages, resulting in 83,000 people having to leave their land behind as the dam waters started rising in the reservoir. Engaged since a few decades in a global perspective of agrarian development, the Government of Maharashtra (GoM) therein advocates a Green Revolution for Vidarbha, a region labelled as ‘backwards’. Grounded in a qualitative and quantitative village study which followed this process over more than ten years, this chapter seeks to analyze the resilience of peasant social dispositions in a context of structural violence. When a government plans to wipe a village off the map and relocate it, how does it organize the processes of land acquisition and compensation of agrarian resources? How does the peasantry adjust to confiscation of its rural lifestyle and to the uncertainty of its social ‘forth-coming’? Forming a ‘community of fate’ due to their re-aggregation in a new space, the structure and the trajectory of the displacement of four villages are analyzed through the prism of the morphological categories of community existence and the ‘resettlement inequalities’ they determine. Engendering depeasantization, impoverishment and a disaggregation of social bonding, displacement acts as an indicator of people’s unequal dispositions to relocate their existence in the hierarchy of a society. This chapter thus spatializes the question of the Indian social structure and proposes a study of the production of inequalities in movement.
