Environment as Land: Understanding Anti-displacement Politics in Jharkhand

Abstract

While environmental claim-making is centered on nature as the object of protection or preservation, the invocation of land remains marginal to discussions on environmentalism. Land claims remain in the realm of agrarian or material discursive practices. This article analyzes an anti-displacement adivasi movement in Jharkhand in India to examine its environmental praxis. The movement articulates a distinct attachment of adivasis to land which undergirds the process of resistance to forceful land acquisition. An environmental discourse is invoked to protect continued access to land, not land itself, thereby acting back on such a discursive politics to inflect it with a material praxis that places the producer at the center.