Abstract:
The thesis documents and analyzes ongoing contestations around informal settlements on the hills of Guwahati, Northeast India’s largest city. It draws on archival research to explore how post-independence urban development in Guwahati led to the displacement and dispossession of indigenous tribal communities. This process of exclusionary urbanization continues in the contemporary period, as settlements on the hills surrounding the city confront pressures to remove them. These conflicts around the hill settlements are described and analyzed based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Guwahati. Located within critical and postcolonial urban studies as well as urban political ecology, the study draws on the large body of literature on informal settlements in cities of the global south, especially evictions driven by middle-class urban environmental politics. The review of literature also covers the historical marginalization of tribal communities in India and ethnic politics and land struggles in Northeast India. The thesis explores the broad structural and institutional conditions as well as the micro-processes that marginalize local and migrant tribal communities in the hill settlements, as well as their responses to efforts to dislodge them. The discussion focuses especially on pressures from local environmental groups and the state to evict the hill settlements – many of which are deemed illegal encroachments on forest land – in the name of nature conservation and urban environmental protection. Multiple and competing claims to land by settlers and various state agencies (national, state and municipal) have engendered protest and resistance, which have taken different forms over the years. These conflicts have been complicated by jurisdictional ambiguities in the administration of hill lands, especially due to forest notifications on long inhabited land and the creation of a wildlife sanctuary.
Against this background, the thesis explores two key dimensions of these conflicts around the hill settlements: First, it documents the everyday legal and discursive strategies deployed by hill settlers in their quest to sustain their communities and ensure clear land titles. Second, it traces the evolution of organized anti-eviction movements, highlighting the shift from Left-led mobilizations in the 1970s to a politics of identity in the 2000s as the ‘indigenous’ tribal identity of hill settlers was foregrounded to bolster their claims to land and place. The thesis contributes to theorizing the struggles of the urban poor for a ‘right to the city’ by foregrounding how anti-eviction movements are enmeshed in, and shaped by, the regional, environmental and political specificities of southern cities and the agrarian or forested regions in which most are embedded. In the case of Guwahati, settlements on forest lands (within or contiguous to the city), the tribal identity of the settlers, and the larger politics of citizenship in Assam and Northeast India have shaped how mobilizations against eviction have unfolded and demands for land rights are articulated.