Politics of Development and Forced Mobility

This book broadly analyzes the displacement or forced relocation of Adivasis Indigenous peoples from the Narmada Valley in India due to the construction and execution of a large development project, the Sardar Sarovar project, which has substantially transformed Adivasi lives, roles, practices, and autonomy, and increased their dependence on capital, market, unsustainable farming practices and urban jobs. Globally, Indigenous communities live within a legacy of environmental dispossession due to economic development that dismantles their mental and physical well-being and a land-based way of life. Appropriation, dispossession, and accumulation is historical and contemporary. Stories of Adivasi people illustrate the horrors of systematic marginalization, in general, and Adivasi women’s reduced autonomy and economic sufficiency, in particular. Key to mention here is that decades of resistance, protests, counter-struggles, marches, direct action did not overturn bureaucratic regressions or structural and direct violence towards marginalized or resettled Adivasi people, but enabled networks of solidarity arguing their rights and access. The book does not attest to state or corporate power, but validates Adivasi agency and autonomy.  

Sutapa Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies and Development Studies programs at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. Her areas of interest are gender, migrations, development justice, social movements, political ecology and Indigeneity. Currently she pursues research on migrant incarceration, borders, and autonomy in Rome, Italy. She also continues to write on Indigeneity, food sovereignty, emancipatory politics, and development justice. She has lectured in many universities and research institutes across North America and Europe. She is an editor of Interface and on the advisory board of ACME. She has published in Interface; ACME; Gender, Place and Culture; Population, Place and Space; Environment and Planning D; Geopolitics; and Capitalism Nature Socialism on Indigenous anti-colonial struggles, development-induced dislocation, colonial and post-colonial appropriation of bodies and nature, anarch/eco-feminist pedagogies, feminist research methodologies, migrant agency, and border politics. She is co-editor of Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy (with P. Mudu, 2017). Along the way, she has volunteered in homeless youth shelters, migrant students/women’s centers, union, and variously reviewed and supervised students’ writing projects. As a teacher and researcher in Development, Feminism, and Geography, her objective is to get educated on how and why the world has been organized the way it is and how can she contribute to transforming the world to a better and equitable place that offers respect to all.