Fluid Lands: Possession and properrty in the forest fringes of central India

Abstract

This paper examines narratives of land ownership and possession in an adivasi or indigenous village in rural central India. Indigeneity-based land and forest claims have been historically fraught issues in India. Legal and activist efforts to settle the rights of forest-dwellers to forest lands frequently invoke the sacrality, ecological uniqueness and inviolability of adivasi territories as spaces removed from the realm of everyday circulations and transactions. This paper attempts to re-situate land and possession claims in the flux of everyday life and rural social relations. In the villages studied, conflicting claims over village and forest lands frequently erupted in disputes over encroachment or ‘atikraman’. Tracking a longstanding atikraman dispute between two neighbouring groups, the paper draws out the idea of property as a form of storytelling wherein maintaining possession becomes a matter of who can more persuasively enact and narrate their claim. Furthermore, narratives of possession encode histories of neighbourly relations of reciprocity, exchange, betrayal and animosity.  Juxtaposing the ownership narratives of adivasi villagers with anthropological debates on property and possession, this paper offers a fresh perspective on the adivasi-land question, not in terms of the frequently invoked binary between meaning and materiality, but as the moving ground of social life, tethering individuals and groups to particular lifeworlds and social histories.