Anticipation of Dispossession: Narratives from the Mallanasagar Reservoir Area

What does it mean to live in ‘anticipation of dispossession’? How do human relations, cultural moorings and external threats—here embodied in state power—interlink to reconfigure the lifeworlds of villagers in the reservoir area, foregrounding the collective experience of ‘anticipation of dispossession’? How tenable is governmental logic on the urgency of development projects in terms of the lived experience and lifeworlds of those facing imminent removal? Can compensation in fact compensate the layers of loss suffered by those who are displaced? The collectivity built around the collective ownership of the village (an ownership distinct from legal title) and a sense of rootedness and identity—a situated belonging—are jeopardised by dispossession.Is this shared notion of ownership quantifiable?
These questions are explored through a close look at socio-demographic details (and diversities therein) of the affected villages, through conversations and interviews with people living in the villages in the Mallanasagar reservoir area in Telangana marked for submergence by the project. Beyond the physical and ecological impact associated with irrigation projects, questions have most often centred around the geographical distribution of livelihoods, politics of administrative decision-making processes, relocation and resettlement plans for ‘project affected people’, and the politics and rationale of projects of displacement. This article attempts to unravel the cultural ramifications of dispossession. In trying to understand the governmental action that deliberately disregards the many-layered, complex articulations of a people’s refusal to comply, especially their refusal to move, to leave their territory and homelands, we signpost debates on dispossession that foreground the intersecting axes—of the accumulation of dispossession, regimes of dispossession and cultures of dispossession—as particularly relevant to a granular, textured understanding of the experience of dispossession. In terms of compensation, relief and rehabilitation, what is to be compensated, or redressed, and how might this be done?