The ‘past’ in the present (and futures) of a colliery basti: Case study of a resettled coal community in Eastern India

Abstract

A resettled colony is visualised as a living space which provides agency to individuals, groups, and institutions to reconstruct the lives and livelihoods of the displaced. Through individual and collective memories of the resettled, meanings are infused into the lived space by real and symbolic acts of reconnecting. The collective and individual memories of the pasts are critical to the daily reproduction of livelihoods, meaning and identities of the resettled. Hence, resource communities that move away from coal spaces navigate their livelihoods through space and time, wherein multiple linkages to their overlapping social identities of indigeneity, class, caste and gender, mining identity and the resettled identity are reinstated, rediscovered and/or reimagined in the process of remembering or forgetting the past relative to the present while seeking for alternative livelihood futures. Through an ethnographic study of the displaced colliery bastis in the Jharia coalfields of Jharkhand who are resettled away from coal, we discuss the role of memories in multiple interrelated spheres: the relational living space that intersects with the neighbourhoods, the public spaces and ‘social’ infrastructure, the livelihoods space, and the institutionalised spaces of governance, and thereafter, relate these experiences to the future pathways for the resource community. The authors find that resettled livelihoods, in the multiplicity of identities, are intertwined with immediate and distant memories, hence migration or local history provides alternative pathways to the young and the older generations, respectively while many of them remain entangled in the circuits of mining capital by moving back to coal.