State, scarcity, and survival: A minor history of people and place in the Lower Bari Doab, Punjab

Abstract

The progressive materialization of the modern state and capitalist agrarian production in the interfluvial uplands of Punjab was enabled by colonial ideologies of control over nature as progress. The colonial project of the transformation of the people and place in Punjab was built upon the imperial aesthetics of waste that imagined the local landscape as hideous and pastoral communities as “semi-barbarous.” These imaginaries justified the colonial project of technological control over nature through installation of hydraulic infrastructure and the political control of native communities as investments in cultivation and culture. These statist narratives of progress are built upon an elision of the voices of subaltern communities and their interactions with the modern state. Based on my ethnographic and archival works on pastoral Baloch tribes of the Lower Bari Doab region of Punjab, I argue that a different history emerges if traced from the perspective of the communities located on the margins of this hydrosocial assemblage. This is a minor history that does not privilege state as the protagonist of progress rather traces the stories of survival in the face of eco-scarcity. As the current environmental crisis accentuates the inherent instabilities of the hydrosocial assemblage in the canal colonies, it also reveals limitation of the narratives of control over nature as progress. In a world threatened by the anthropogenic climate crisis, the possibilities of a better future might emerge in curating the stories of survival against the histories of control.