Abstract
The Introduction to Resisting Dispossession: The Odisha Story provides a historical context both for the development trajectory and the resistance against it in the post-independent period in the State of Odisha in East India. It attempts to show how these ten resistance movements spanning over nearly seven decades constitute an important part of the political history of Odisha seen from below. It is women, peasants, dalits and adivasis who make this history while protecting their sources of subsistence. People have fought against being displaced and dispossessed in the entire development trajectory from the construction of the Hirakud Dam in the 1950s to the entry of corporations like POSCO and Vedanta in contemporary times. The Introduction covers some pertinent points while interrogating the nature of development brought through mining and industrialization. People’s fight to protect their subsistence living becomes bloodier in the post-liberalization phase when the state becomes ruthless in safeguarding the interest of corporate capital. The thin line between consent and coercion blurs completely as people are coerced into the ‘development’ paradigm thrust by state and capital. By foregrounding the theme of subsistence vis à vis capital, the Introduction connects all ten resistance movements that are otherwise separate in terms of time and space. The Introduction tries to draw the attention of readers to the nature of these struggles. By protecting their sources of livelihood, people protect land, mountains, forests, streams and rivers. In short, it is they, who protect the planet and its entire humanity. In this period of great derangement, these movements give hope and inspiration.
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Notes
- 1.
Andrew Stirling writes how while invading Odisha in the year 1580, Sawai Sai Singh, who was the General of Akbar, exclaimed: ‘This country is not a fit subject for conquest, and schemes of human ambition. It belongs wholly to the Gods, and is one entire Tirth.’
- 2.
In the words of W.W. Hunter: ‘To the world’s call-roll of heroes, it will add not one name. The people of whom it treats have fought no great battle for human liberty, nor have they succeeded even in more primary task of subduing the forces of nature to the control of man. To them the world stands indebted for not a single discovery which augments the comforts or mitigates the calamities of life. Even in literature—the peculiar glory of the India race—they have won no conspicuous triumph. They have written no famous epic; they have struck out no separate school of philosophy; they have elaborated no new system of law.’
- 3.
In 2011, the name of the state was changed from Orissa to Odisha, and the name of its language from Oriya to Odia.
- 4.
Most non-English words have been italicized barring those found in dictionaries as Indian English entries. A glossary of Odia words used in this book is provided in Annexure B.
- 5.
See Political Unrest in Orissa in the 19th Century written by Prasanna Kumar Mishra. The Kandhas and Savaras of Ghumsur, Surada, Chinakimedi, Parlakhemundi, Boudh, Daspalla, Nayagarh, Kalahandi and Patna (present Balangir) revolted against the colonialists from 1837 to 1856; Binjhals and Gonds actively participated in the Sambalpur region from 1857 to 1864; the Bhuyans, Juangs and Kols and the peasantry rose in revolt against British imperialism and the feudal king in Keonjhar and its adjoining region in 1867–1868 and in 1891–1993. See also Roots of Poverty, A Social History by Fanindam Deo, where he describes how the Kondhs of Kandhan, the kandha land, rose in rebellion in 1881–1882.
- 6.
Fakir Mohan Senapati’s novel Chha Mana Aatha Guntha was first published in Odia in 1902. The novel depicts the misery of the Odia peasantry under the zamindari system in the early colonial system. The novel was serialized in the journal Utkal Sahitya beginning in 1897 and continued till its publication as a book in 1902. Its realistic depiction made people think that events narrated in the novel were real. When the story reached the court trial, hundreds of people from nearby villages gathered at the court in Cuttack in anticipation to actually see Mangaraj—a zamindar—on trial!
- 7.
The biography of Madhusudan Das has been written in fictional style.
- 8.
It was written by Shri Mohanty during 1930s as a school textbook but remained unpublished. Gopinath Mohanty Foundation Trust & Centre for Human Sciences published this in e-book format in 2018.
- 9.
See Annexure C for a project profile of each project covered in the chapters that follow.
- 10.
It was a master plan for the integrated development of the river basins of Odisha and presented as the sixth Sir M. Visvesvaraya lecture delivered at the 43rd Annual Convention of the Institution of Engineers (India). Khosla was then the Governor of Odisha.
- 11.
Bharat Chandra Nayak has recounted his experience in his autobiography how in a meeting at Cuttack, nobody approved his idea of scrapping Hirakud project but rather wanted that people should be properly rehabilitated.
- 12.
Roots of Poverty by Fanindam Deo is a study on Kalahandi. Manoranjan Mohanty and Bijay Bahidar, in their book Odisha Daridra Kahinki (Why Odisha Is Poor), have also shown how the socio-economic structures are responsible for the poverty of Odisha, which no amount of industrialization can remove.
- 13.
Business Standard (Orissa to notify Talasara as 14th port site—18 April 2012).
- 14.
Song composed and set to tune by Bhagaban Majhi, a leading activist of Prakrutika Sampad Surakshya Parishad (PSSP) in Kucheipadar, Kashipur. It became popular across all anti-displacement movements in India.
- 15.
An interesting anecdote from the biography of Sarangdhar Das, the pioneer of the garhjat praja movement, reveals how before the finalization of list of candidates for the Odisha Assembly in 1946, a registered letter from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the President of Congress Parliamentary Board, reached the Odisha Congress Office in the name of Harekrushna Mahatab. The letter contained a cheque of Rs. 10,000/- and a letter from Patel. It was written that this was a donation by the Birlas for the Odisha Congress. It was also suggested to elect G.D. Thirani from the Industry and Commerce seat of Odisha.
- 16.
Vikalpa Sandhani Manch was an alternative forum in Bhubaneswar that was started in the year 1994. It was devoted to understand Odisha and its people, to explore some unexplored aspects of much publicized happenings in Odisha and to identify people ignored by the mainstream media in order to listen to them and to their viewpoints. The Manch used to organize discussions around people’s issues every year on Utkal Divas, which is April 1, and publish the discussions in Sameekshya. It was edited by Birendra Nayak, Pradumna Bal and Debiprasad Dash. The theme of Sameekshya ’96 was on ‘People’s Movements in Post-independent Odisha’ and Sameekshya ’98 was on ‘People’s Movement in Post-independent Odisha and Participation of Women.’
- 17.
The novel Paraja by Gopinath Mohanty was published in 1945. The protagonist is an adivasi peasant who gets trapped in a debt from the local sahukar that ultimately leads to the tragic destruction of his small family. Written on an epic scale, it reflects the fragility of lives dependent on subsistence production in the forested mountains of undivided Koraput district. The book has been translated into several languages, including English.
- 18.
James Scott begins the book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia with a graphic description of a man standing permanently in water with water up to his neck, which was used by Tawney in writing about China in 1931. Scott outlines the economic and political tensions in peasant communities of Burma and Vietnam during the 1930s. Influenced by E.P. Thompson’s understanding of the moral economy, he elucidates how the moral economy becomes an important variable that can impact social movements. Nine years later, in Weapons of the Weak, James Scott examines everyday forms of resistance depicted in a village in Malaysia taking into account the Gramscian notion and concept of hegemony and peasant resistance to it.
- 19.
Karl Marx had explained how different methods of accumulation depend in part on brute force, but they all employ the power of the state. Force is instrumental to shorten the transition of any old society that holds within it a new one because force is itself an economic power.
- 20.
Books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America provide rich accounts of hundreds of years of pillage, destruction and exploitation of the most ordinary people.
- 21.
The White Paper (2010) published by Govt. of Orissa, Department of Home testifies (p. 2).
- 22.
In Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu, thirteen people were killed in police firing on 22 May 2018. The state government had acquired land from many of these villages in the early nineties with the promise of jobs and compensation that never came. The people were protesting against the contamination of the entire area and its villages by Sterlite Copper company, which is owned by the same Vedanta Limited.
- 23.
In February 2015, the Odisha government issued a notification on the basis of a revision made in its revised land acquisition policy that such land can be kept in a Land Bank by the state government. However, after the Supreme Court on 31 August 2016 ordered the West Bengal government to return the 997 acres it had acquired for the small-car Nano plant of Tata Motors in 2008, there are demands from many other communities in Odisha and elsewhere to implement the same and return the acquired land.
- 24.
A list of names and dates of interviews with people is provided at the end of the book as Annexure A. All names used in the interviews are real with their permission. Interviews or interactions in the past have been mentioned in Notes.
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Padhi, R., Sadangi, N. (2020). Introduction. In: Resisting Dispossession. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0717-5_1
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