ABSTRACT

Focusing on Majuli, the largest river island in the world, situated in the Brahmaputra River, this chapter discusses river islands in island studies scholarship. The emerging scholarship on hydrosociality, within a political ecology of water studies, deals with how water and society make and remake each other over space and time. While early hydrosocial literature mainly dealt with political and social injustices around water services in urban landscapes, where water is piped water, the recent thrust has been on rivers, specifically issues surrounding dam construction or controversies, irrigation maintenance and conflicts, and river basin governance. Flooding and erosion have acquired a particularly devastating character in Majuli and constant displacement has become a part of life for thousands of families living along the riverbanks. In Majuli, flooding and riverbank erosion have rendered thousands of families homeless over the years, and there has been a continuous wave of out-migration of such families to places outside the island.