Paper infrastructures, bureaucracies and land distribution in Telangana, India

0572910 - OÚ 2024 NL eng A - Abstract
Nair Ambujam, Meenakshi
Paper infrastructures, bureaucracies and land distribution in Telangana, India.
n/a.
[IOS Fair Transitions - LANDac Annual International Conference 2023. Utrecht, 28.06.2023-30.06.2023]
Method of presentation: Přednáška
Event organizer: Institutions for Open Societies + Netherlands Land Academy
URL events: https://landgovernance.org/annual-international-conference-2/landac-conference-2023/ 
Institutional support: RVO:68378009
Keywords : land rights * dispossession * bureaucracy * South Asia * anthropology of paper and documents
OECD category: Antropology, ethnology

This paper examines the perplexing conditions of landlessness adivasis or Scheduled Tribe populations of Telangana, in India, experience in their everyday life. Here, I focus on adivasis who were awarded land titles through state-sponsored land distribution and redistribution programmes, with the view of remedying historical injustices, as well as securing their land. Using ethnographic and archival research, I explore the minute and confounding ways in which paperwork constructs and assembles land and land rights. Mobilising the concept, “Paper Infrastructure“, an assemblage of various land documents, I show that land distribution and redistribution schemes are highly textualised practices. That is, precisely because of land’s inherent materiality, land transfers are effected and rendered tangible through paperwork—whereby, the award of titles and land documents signifies the transfer of land. While title deeds can confirm land possession if awarded to plots already possessed, my research examines what happens when they are awarded to lands not in possession. Dwelling on land’s entanglement with paper, I elucidate how state bureaucracies make it seem as though lands have been transferred to adivasis by awarding title-deeds. However, by deferring their responsibility of ensuring the actual physical transfer of lands, adivasis remain de facto landless even as documents suggest otherwise. Consequently, I argue that landlessness and dispossession may not necessarily manifest as violent and repressive land grabs in contemporary times, but as quieter processes enlivened through the production and circulation of documentary artefacts, intended to remedy the very forms of landlessness they unwittingly perpetuate.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0347543