Labouring for new lives: negotiating dispossession in Assam, India

This paper focuses on the protracted character of dispossession and its implications for the various ways in which people respond to and negotiate with a process that lasts decades. It does this by taking up the case of Laika forest village located in Assam, India. Through an oral history of Laika and its scattering over the last four decades, we delve into the ways in which people have confronted their growing precarity and land loss. By focusing on the long timescale of this process, the paper emphasises the non-linear, dynamic and heterogenous nature of dispossession and resettlement that often takes place over a span of several decades. Through changing conditions and perceptions, communities bearing the brunt of land dispossession are engaged in years of labour, be it the labour of resistance or making demands of the state, or the labour of building new lives in resettled sites. By focusing on the period between being completely uprooted from the land and being fully settled on new lands, this essay will build a deeper understanding of the variegated and dynamic character of processes of land dispossession and resettlement and rehabilitation.