Dispossession by Mining and Differentiation Among Young Men by Chalaki in Eastern India

Abstract

Utkal Alumina started the first private bauxite mining project in India in the mid‑1990s in the Baphlimali hills of Kashipur (a town in the Rayagada district of Odisha, a state in eastern India). And it set up its refinery in the Ramibeda valley at Doraguda. Kashipur, populated mostly by Adivasis and Dalits (Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes), is designated a Fifth Schedule Area under the Constitution of India to protect their interests. The villagers started a movement as soon as the project was announced. The movement stalled the project for over 18 years before collapsing in 2010. In 2012, a set of young men emerged in the refinery area, widely considered chalak, or more able than others to successfully negotiate individual gains from Utkal. This ethnographic paper, an exploration of chalaki as a strategy—and the ways it shaped the life‑chances of young men—demonstrates that chalaki drew from the skills acquired through participation in the movement and these skills were recast in the changed context in which Utkal engaged with these men closely. This creation and development of individual aspirational strategies, I argue, provide a diagnostic of emerging subaltern subjectivities among young men as they face the gap between aspirations and broken dreams; and differentiation among them in contexts where social movements opposing projects of dispossession undergo long processes of fragmentation, decline and collapse.