Infrastructures of caste and violence: fueling political transformations in India’s wind energy sector

Abstract

Wind turbine farms produce power, in the form of electricity, but they also generate social power reconfigurations and alter existing structures that determine the capacities, actions, beliefs or conducts of different actors. In rural India, power is intimately linked to the unequal distribution of landed property, and to structures of caste, class and gender. This paper suggests exploring the winds of change brought by the arrival of wind turbines as renewed infrastructures of caste and violence in a rural and agrarian borderland between India and Pakistan.

I propose to emphasize in a new-fashioned way the connections between the power of energy (as energopower), its material and infrastructural dimensions, and the power of caste as an organizing and all-encompassing ‘foundational category’ that commands agency and power. The arrival of wind turbine programs in a rural district of Western India (Kutch) has profoundly reconfigured existing political patronage networks, land relations, accumulation strategies, caste identities and the use of violence. But at the same time, caste, as this paper shows, was also the central medium through which knowledge, network, and information about the wind industry were accessed and political reactions were imagined, as energy infrastructures were firmly embedded in a landscape of money, muscle power, masculinity and party politics.

Relying on a 7-month ethnographic study, I argue that wind infrastructures have re-energized caste hierarchies and given renewed relevance to more traditional brokerage activities.