Social Science Research Council

"Intimate Contentions: Class, Community and Nationhood in Chhattisgarh in Central India (1947-2005)"

My research is an attempt to find new ways of posing the fundamental question: How has capitalist modernity framed, and continued to frame, the experiences of societies where it did not emerge organically, but was imposed by colonial rule? Specifically, how does it continue to shape the political practice of such societies? Using archival and ethnographic tools, I will study how Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (Chhattisgarh Liberation Movement, CMM henceforth), an Indian trade union, negotiates between the identities of class, community and nationhood. CMM was formed in 1977 as a mine workers union of the manual workers in the iron-ore mines of Bhilai Steel Plant, one of the first government-owned steel plants in independent India. CMM emerged as a response to conventional trade unions that did not represent manual workers. Recognizing that manual workers were recruited mainly from native Chhattisgarhi population, CMM broadened into a movement for the political autonomy of Chhattisgarh, calling for a separate federal state within India. CMM has to be understood in the context of the project of modernity that continued with extreme nationalistic zeal in India following independence. The postcolonial Indian state was faced with the dilemma of creating an economy that was productive as well as employment generating. How did the Indian state attempt to make citizen-laborers out of its subjects? How did the latter negotiate between the newly acquired class, ethnic and national subjectivities? What kinds of political practices emerged from these negotiations?