Abstract
Utkal Alumina started the first private bauxite mining project in India in the mid‑1990s in the Baphlimali hills of Kashipur (a town in the Rayagada district of Odisha, a state in eastern India). And it set up its refinery in the Ramibeda valley at Doraguda. Kashipur, populated mostly by Adivasis and Dalits (Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes), is designated a Fifth Schedule Area under the Constitution of India to protect their interests. The villagers started a movement as soon as the project was announced. The movement stalled the project for over 18 years before collapsing in 2010. In 2012, a set of young men emerged in the refinery area, widely considered chalak, or more able than others to successfully negotiate individual gains from Utkal. This ethnographic paper, an exploration of chalaki as a strategy—and the ways it shaped the life‑chances of young men—demonstrates that chalaki drew from the skills acquired through participation in the movement and these skills were recast in the changed context in which Utkal engaged with these men closely. This creation and development of individual aspirational strategies, I argue, provide a diagnostic of emerging subaltern subjectivities among young men as they face the gap between aspirations and broken dreams; and differentiation among them in contexts where social movements opposing projects of dispossession undergo long processes of fragmentation, decline and collapse.
I Introduction
Talking agitatedly on the phone, Juji, 1 an Adivasi in his early 30s, hurried into a small eating place across the Utkal Alumina refinery (hereafter ‘Utkal’ or ‘the company’) at Doraguda. 2 Many small shacks serving idli-vada, and a few tiny grocery and cloth shops, cycle repair shanties and a small chicken house, had come up there in 2011. Juji was elegantly dressed in a red T-shirt, a matching cap, a pair of denim jeans and white sports shoes. Most of the young men now wore T-shirts and jeans or pajamas, a cap and shoes or slippers—a shift from the lungi that men, old and young alike, wore in 1990s. Standing in the backyard of the eatery and waiting for lunch, I could hear the dark, lean, short, sprightly man cursing the company administrative officer Mr. Narayan over the phone in the local dialect for commissioning him a construction contract worth ₹600,000—a project much smaller than promised. Conversation over, he finished his coffee and rushed out. Some bystanders congratulated him on his new bike. But he pointed at the refinery and commented, ‘These are maghya (motherfuckers)! But what to do, our boys are bhakua (fools). A snake must be held by its neck; otherwise, it will bite us,’ and then straddled his bike and rode off into the refinery. Juji’s words hit a raw nerve among the bystanders. One bitterly asserted ‘it was right that “the local young men 3 were fools” and had allowed “company rule” in the area.’ This internalised feeling of being “fools” probably stemmed from the fact that the company had neither created significant jobs nor provided regular construction contracts to a majority of the young men despite such demands. Anguished, a young person asked, ‘But can we become chalak like him [Juji]?’
In Odia, the official language of Odisha, chalak is a connotative noun; its adjectival form is chalaki. A contronymic word, when referring to someone as clever and smart, chalaki is considered a positive attribute; when referring to someone as shrewd, cunning and crafty, it is pejorative. This paper attempts to explore the concept of chalaki the young men in the anecdote refer to. What constituted it? How was it acquired? Under what circumstances was it fostered? What possibilities of mobility did it provide to the dispossessed young men? And what were the life-chances of those who were not chalak?
The Government of India announced the National Mineral Policy in 1993. The policy allowed private investment into the mining sector. In the mid-1990s, 4 Utkal proposed to mine the Baphlimali hills 5 in Kashipur 6 for bauxite and set up its refinery in the Ramibeda valley. However, Kashipur is a Scheduled Area, areas so designated by the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution of India to protect the habitats of Scheduled Tribes. 7 The Adivasi and Dalits formed the Prakrutika Sampada Surakhya Parishad (PSSP; Council for Protection of Natural Resources) to oppose the project when it was announced. The protracted movement (hereafter ‘the Kashipur movement’ or ‘the movement’) went through a long process of fragmentation and collapsed in 2010. Afterwards, Utkal commissioned construction contracts in the village and on company sites to several movement participants. They worked as unregistered petty contractors. Juji was such a PSSP participant and unregistered petty contractor.
Throughout this period (1995 to 2011), Utkal promised employment and a good life to cooperating villagers but did not give locals jobs after the movement collapsed even though construction work intensified. Most jobs were given to outsiders (Donegan 2018; Levien 2018; Parry 1999). Merely 160 individuals from two displaced villages and a colony from another village were contractually employed in labour‑class jobs such as gardening and cleaning. As I wrapped up fieldwork by mid-2012, the anxieties of young men regarding their futures were palpable. During 2010 and 2011, most of the young men expressed the hope of doing well as the company paid them an unemployment allowance (see Section IV; also see Dash 2017 for the politics of hope and waiting in the area after the movement declined). By early 2012, however, Utkal had stopped paying the allowance, and the hope for a good future had dimmed and mutated into profound anguish. It was during this period that positive life-chances were linked to chalaki. The young men expressed their anguish as follows, ‘We hope to do well … but what to do? We do not have chalaki.’ In early 2012, a small section of young villagers appeared on the horizon, notably in the villages where the movement was strong in its heyday. These men were widely considered to be more able than others to negotiate individual gains from Utkal.
I demonstrate that the skills associated with chalaki, though acquired through participation in the movement, were recast as subjectivities fostered by Utkal. It is suggested that in neoliberal environments, governments and others institutions govern at a distance through strategies that encourage individuals to take self-responsibility (Lemke 2002). In the context of mining, this is achieved through corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects (Dolan and Rajak 2016; Gardner 2012; Welker 2014). Utkal however, engaged directly and closely, albeit flexibly, with a particular set of young men on a day-to-day basis that fostered chalaki among young men. This creation and development of such individual aspirational strategies, I argue, provides a diagnostic of emerging subaltern subjectivities among young men and differentiation among them in contexts where social movements opposing projects of dispossession have undergone long processes of fragmentation, decline and collapse. I show that the individual negotiations of the youth superseded collective struggles in dialogue with neoliberal subjectivities and the emotional dispositions that were spurred in context of strategies of the mining company. Through the trajectories of young Adivasi and Dalit individuals, capturing their aspirations and struggles, dreams and broken hopes, this paper provides a particular story of subaltern subjectivities in a ‘”New India” (which is) … as much about hope and optimism as about the anxiety of not making it’ (Kaur 2020: 47). The paper highlights the gaps between what the young men aspired to and what they actually succeeded in getting in contexts where the mining company spurred the dreams to do well. This evokes Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’ (2011): embracing optimism can help to overcome anxieties and uncertainties in life-shattering circumstances. It closely resonates with the aspirations of young men in the refinery area to ‘do well’ and have a ‘good life’ (to them consisting of ideas of consumption, mobility and infrastructure development). This also foregrounds the gaps between such aspirations and who can achieve what and—as young men are caught in a whirlpool of anxiety, hope, despair and angst—the consequent dissonance.
The next section discusses the larger neoliberal environment and corporate mining in which salient subaltern subjectivities are currently being shaped in India.
II Situating Chalaki: Neoliberal Environments and Subaltern Subjectivities
Exclusion, dispossession of marginal communities and insecurity of labour have come to be associated with the processes of economic liberalisation worldwide (Harvey 2005; Wacquant 2009). In India, too, liberalisation has rewired sociality and led to increasing insecurity, exclusion of labour, dispossession and migration (Breman 2004; Joshi 2003; Chandavarkar 1994; Shrivastava and Kothari 2012).
For Adivasi and Dalit communities, however, the experience of exclusion and discrimination is nothing new (Deshpande 2011; Shah et al. 2018; Xaxa 1999). Their marginality is evident in the stark social gap—of over 30–40 percentage points—in the health, consumption, educational and economic indicators of the Human Deprivation Index and Human Development Index (Raveendran and Kannan 2011; Zacharias and Vakulabharanam 2011; Thorat 2013). Their exclusion can be seen in their experience with private industrial mining—60 million Adivasis and other lower‑caste individuals have been displaced due to ‘development projects’ (mines, dams, industry), conservative estimates suggest (Parry 2020; Sanchez and Strumpell 2014). 8 Since the 1990s, mining-induced dispossession has intensified (Xaxa and Devy 2021). ‘Jobless growth’ and the creation of surplus labour has adversely affected the general condition of labour (Sanyal 2007). And the job prospects of dispossessed Adivasi-Dalits in the mining sector have been sabotaged by the creation of steep educational barriers (Sanchez and Strumpell 2014; Sanchez 2016; Parry 2020) and technological advancement (Bennett and McDowell 2012; Lahiri-Dutt 1999; 2014).
Analogously, and drawing on Foucauldian ideas of governmentality, thinkers suggest that neoliberal environments foster a new kind of subjectivity as individuals become entrepreneurial subjects spurred by a grammar of aspiration and the possibilities of maximising their life-chances. They constantly engage in self-fashioning as the state and its institutions govern at a distance. Social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty and life-chances become matters of personal provisioning (Rose and Miller 1992: 179-180, 198-201; Lemke 2002; see Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996). In the context of neoliberal mining, for instance, CSR has become the mechanism through which mining‑affected communities are regulated from a distance; CSR projects seek to create self-referential, operationally closed spaces that strive to make affected communities take responsibility for their lives and fates (Vallentin and Murillo 2009) through the discourses of participation, partnership, empowerment, sustainability and the enterprising self (Gardner 2012; Rajak 2011; Welker 2014). These subjectivities have emerged in the context of rising economic aspirations, insecurity, uncertain futures and a narrowing of opportunities that define neoliberal environments and resulted in a proliferation of individual strategies among young people to move forward in the face of considerable economic constraints and a lack of opportunity (Carswell and De Neve 2018; Gooptu 2009; 2013; Jeffrey 2010; Kaur 2016; Upadhyay and Vasavi 2008; for an excellent global overview, see Parry and Hann 2018). Self-making practices—such as inscribing the body with corporeal and soft skills and developing suitable attitudes and practices that are negotiated and reflexively appropriated by subjects—become central to this project. Crucially, these subjectivities do not take shape in a social vacuum; there are ‘multiple modalities of subject making’ in which class, gender and social histories are crucial (Gooptu 2009; see also Carswell and De Neve 2018). These subjectivities and strategies congeal around the inter-braided concepts of enterprise, jugaad and resourcefulness. The concept of enterprise assumes that individuals become entrepreneurs of themselves through self-making practices (Rose and Miller 1992). Jugaad, a popular colloquial Hindi word conveys a sense of making do or getting by—entailing an idiom of the enterprising self (Young and Jeffrey 2012); resourcefulness, or the complex of capital possessed by individuals; and recombination (Jauregui 2014; Krishna 2002; Jeffrey 2010; Jeffrey and Young 2014). These navigational strategies are negotiated, contingent, provisional, not foolproof (Jauregui 2014; Krishna 2002; Jeffrey 2010)—foregrounding its conditional nature.
Exploring chalaki as a particular subaltern strategy of advancement in the context of the decline of the Kashipur movement, I show that its conceptual terrain is different from jugaad in terms of how the subjectivities associated with chalaki were acquired through the experience of the movement and how these subjectivities related to their histories of marginalisation and were spurred by Utkal to minimise local opposition so it could operate without hindrance. Methodologically, instead of treating neoliberalism as a master category to explain it, I subscribe to Ong’s approach of considering neoliberalism a migratory technology of governing that reflexively interacts with situated sets of elements and highlights the intersection of wider political-economic and sociocultural processes with historical and geographically specific practices (2007: 3–8; 2006). Ethnographic fieldwork for this paper was conducted in the refinery area villages over a ten-month period between 2010 and 2012; a subsequent, shorter fieldwork was undertaken in June 2018. A longitudinal perspective was adopted to map the divergent trajectories of four young men to understand changes in their income and lifestyle.
III The Kashipur Movement
This section provides a glimpse of the beginnings of the Kashipur movement and its trajectory over a 20-year period starting from the mid-1990s. The movement went through a series of fragmentation as the mining company strengthened its hold in the region. Displacement of villages and acquisition of land was nearly complete by 2012. Interestingly, during this period a set of chalak young men emerged on the horizon in villages where the movement used to be strong.
The villagers attacked mining‑related construction work from the beginning and even took hostages on a few occasions. Soon, social activists from Odisha began participating in organising work, living among the villagers and engaging with adolescent boys and young men involved in mobilising villages. The movement faced severe repression—policemen and company-hired goons would routinely beat up leaders and participants—and following threats from the administration, and though the movement raged on, many villages accepted compensation for land in 1996. Utkal paid them ₹21,000–₹27,000 per acre. Private land in Scheduled Areas cannot be sold to non-tribals; so, there is no way to assess its price. But, depending on location, the price of one acre of land in nearby non-tribal panchayats were ₹300,000–₹600,000 during late 1990s. The administration slapped a slew of criminal cases on the PSSP leaders and participants (see Dash 2017). Undeterred, the PSSP mobilised a much larger area and organised bigger rallies and bal pradarshan (show of strength) meetings. Facing formidable local protests, TISCO withdrew from the project in 1997. After three Adivasis were shot dead in an unprovoked police firing at Maikanch village in 2000, the other stakeholders sold their stake to Hindalco, the project was put on ice and it seemed that the movement had won. A programme of political education was launched, night schools were started in several villages and outside activists organised regular trainings for movement participants. Many adolescents and young men took these trainings on politics and development and taught in the night schools as teachers alongside the activists.
Displacement, Fragmentation of Movement and the Emergence of the Chalak
The police set up a large outpost was set up in December 2004 and paralysed the movement’s attempts at mass mobilisation for over a year. Several PSSP leaders and participants were arrested. Between 2004 and 2006, two villages were displaced at gunpoint and the villagers relocated to a rehabilitation colony. The movement seemed to be over, and Utkal constructed a makeshift office in 2006–07. However, in 2007, the leaders of the displaced villages reached out to PSSP and formed a committee. All the 26 affected villages were represented. A skirmish over employment in 2009 led young villagers to vandalise the offices of Utkal and major contractors like Gulf Oil and Larsen & Toubro. The committee launched strikes in February 2008, paralysing Utkal’s work for over nine months, but construction work accelerated—a number of committee leaders and dalals 9 were blamed for manipulating the strikes during 2009–10 (Dash 2023). As collective action receded, Utkal issued hundreds of construction projects—worth ₹8.7 million—to these unregistered petty contractors- most of whom were either committee members or dalals or both. 10 This group of nouveau riche contractors indulged in a consumerist lifestyle—they bought and rode flashy bikes, wore jeans and shoes and used smartphones—that the youth found new and attractive (Dash 2023). As construction work accelerated, the local youth would often block roads and company vehicles and, sometimes, take drivers and company officials hostage; on the other hand many relatively educated young men begin to flock to the company lawns seeking employment, training and sponsorship opportunities. In response, Utkal began paying them a monthly unemployment allowance of ₹1,800–₹5,000. As the possibility of collective action dimmed further and work continued without organised opposition, however, monthly allowances became harder to obtain, 11 and the company managers sidelined the contractors they had assembled to undermine the strikes (Dash 2017). 12 By 2012, many movement participants were making individual negotiations with Utkal, and helping young men in filling application letters, getting recommendations of PSSP leaders and demanding petty construction contract work. These chalak men emerged when, following the decline of the movement, PSSP leaders had resumed their earlier professions as farmers, tailors, masons and plumbers and many participants returned to farming. Some also engaged in group action with village youth.
The next section tries to understand the relationship between participation in the movement and the acquisition of chalaki. It delineates the factors that enabled chalak men to engage in productive individual negotiations with Utkal when the movement had collapsed and the company actively fostered chalaki.
IV Becoming Chalak
In February 2012, I saw Tiri storm into the cabin of the chief executive officer (CEO). Accompanied by two boys, Tiri held a letter that requested Utkal to sponsor training for them at an Industrial Training Institute (ITI). 13 The CEO bent sideways, perhaps to keep some distance between them, and agitatedly told him to get their biodata. Tiri pointed a finger at the boys and left, saying, ‘These are my boys!’ When I met Tiri later, he said with angst, ‘Did you see, nani (sister)? Do I have thorns in my body? I can’t stand next to him. Next time, I will take my biodata to that maghya,’ gesturing as if his hand were an axe. Later, on a train journey, Tiri’s father spoke excitedly about the engagements of chalak men with company managers. He censured Tiri for abandoning farming, but his eyes lit up when he spoke of Tiri ‘sitting across the (UAIL) CEO’s chair and demanding work’, pointing towards the gap between our heads as we sat facing each other in the general class side berths to indicate how close, physically, Tiri was to the Utkal CEO.
Winds of Change
Such ability to ‘claim physical space and time’ through ‘bearing and gestures that were self-assured’ (Bourdieu 1984: 476) was in striking contrast with Tiri’s father’s—and his generation’s—experience of being treated by outsiders as ‘sub-humans, as objects of contempt and ridicule’ (Baviskar 2001: 366). In the mid‑1990s, it was not unusual for company goons and the local police to lock movement participants in the toilets of the police station and beat them up, cussing them as idiots, beggars and dirty, ignorant bastards for opposing the company (see Corbridge, Harriss and Jeffrey 2013; Parry 1999; 2020).
Education has led to visible inter-generational changes among the Adivasis (Baviskar 2005; Shah 2010) but the marginal improvement in the literacy rate reflects the decades of government neglect (Sundar 2010; 2016). Kashipur’s literacy rate was an abysmal 13 per cent in 1991, 24.1 per cent in 2001 and 34 per cent in 2011. 14 Adivasi children barely know Odia—Dalit children are relatively fluent—and expectations of Odia teachers regarding language acquisition and learning are low, so the quality of education is poor (Sundar 2016; Thorat and Newman 2010; Xaxa 1999). Thus, chalak individuals’ attainment of linguistic skills, articulation, knowledge bodily disposition or linguistic assertion cannot be fully explained by the role of education, and it contrasted with the diffidence exhibited by most other young men, including the educated, in their interaction with Utkal officials, who failed to obtain sponsorships despite entreaties, affable soft-spoken manner and the effort to look ‘presentable’ (Pathak 2015). How did the chalak distinguish themselves? I turn to understand how they emerged in villages like Kapadar and Hititoba, the nerve centres of the movement.
‘Doing Well’ and the Complex Entanglements of Movement Participation and Education
Tiri and Juji grew up close to the struggle. They carried lanterns and loudspeakers to meetings, put up pamphlets and wrote movement messages on the village walls, sloganeered and sang movement songs. Participating in the movement and spending time with activists was their education. The activists gave them Odia books, discussed issues of development and played cricket with them. Tiri recalled that when the activists gave speeches, his friends and he would grade their speeches on content and impact on participants. On many occasions, Tiri and Juji joined the activists and village elders in confronting company contractors and dalals and argued with local politicians and state officials visiting the region over the meaning of development (Padel and Das 2007). The young movement participants closely watched how activists make a point persuasively and participated in action. It familiarised them with the state’s political and administrative structures as well as cultural attitudes towards them (cf. Krishna 2002; Young and Jeffrey 2012). When the activists divided the region into smaller zones, they entrusted a group of young people to organise village‑level meetings. Two Kapadar boys were assigned a zone; Tiri, then a young adolescent, helped them. They stayed in the villages organising meetings, planning collective action and coordinating with the activists. Tiri had also spent a year working as a driver in Vishakhapatnam 15 for an Adivasi rights organisation that supported the PSSP; there, he interacted with activists from all over the world and learned to make posters expressing his identity and thoughts on development, attended meetings and articulated his thoughts on Adivasi struggles against displacement. Whereas Tiri’s parents owned over 15 acres of land, Juji hailed from a small farmer family in Hititoba. Both Tiri and Juji were educated until high school. Juji frequently visited the night school started by the PSSP and helped teachers improve student footfall. In 2004, Tiri recalled, the district administration had called them to Rayagada to screen a film that explained how the mining project would change their lives for the better. Once the film had ended and Tiri’s friends from the movement and he had exited the theatre, they argued with the district officials there about the meaning of development. Tiri recollected: ‘I said, how can any project that displaces us be for our good? We will eat dust, drink poisoned water and eventually die like insects. Drops of sweat rolled down their foreheads. They never expected that we could argue with them like this.’
During the period of strikes between 2008 and 2010, both Juji and Tiri were closely involved in mobilising work and as the movement collapsed—and just like other young men in the refinery area—they, too, were drawn to the aspiration of ‘doing well’. Lifestyles based on consumption have become a hegemonic symbol, central to the idea of a desirable life (Lukose 2009), and the lifestyle of the contractors—who rode bikes, wore new clothes, carried smartphones and ate out at hotels—attracted them immensely. Scores of technically qualified young men but lacking basic educational qualifications and, therefore, unemployed would loiter on the company lawns unsure of what to do. There latent aspirations were not kindled in the 1990s and late 2000s. Perhaps because the movement presented an alternate worldview. But Utkal’s cash allowances and contractors lifestyles did ignite their expectations of doing well. The enterprising Tiri had begun to spend time inside the company by late 2010. He would fill sponsorship forms for young men from his village and kinship, accompany them to the company office and persuade the CEO to approve the sponsorships. Most Utkal officials knew him as a PSSP participant and treated him with respect, calling him agya (Sir) and offering him tea. Realising that the company management recognised him as different, Tiri took the opportunity to request the CEO for a small construction contract. Within a short period, he had become a prominent petty contractor and local patron of village youth. In January 2012, Utkal awarded him a contract to construct a water tank worth ₹700,000 inside the refinery. Tiri bid doggedly for more construction contracts and over time executed projects worth ₹8 million, mostly building roads, culverts and drains. Tiri hired his two cousins as sub‑contractors and for work orders worth more than a few hundred thousand rupees sub‑contracted to individuals in his networks of kinship and friendship. All this generated goodwill among the villagers. Tiri explained his reasoning: ‘The struggle is over, but we have to live here and make a living. We are not educated. Who would give us jobs in the cities? Utkal has taken our land. We should also get something in return. We also want to do well.’
Juji’s journey was similar:
The boys came to me and said that I should help them as I can argue with the company officials. I thought that such a giant company has come and sat over our lands, it should also benefit us. This is what I think every time I go into the CEO’s or Human Resource Manager’s (HR) office. I have many false criminal cases slapped against me by the company. I told him sternly that we want the company to stay but the people should also benefit. Otherwise, the region would be on fire. I started taking up contract work after Mohanty (a senior official in Utkal) told me to.
Clearly, one-sided persistence had only partially shaped the trajectory of chalak men; it is important to understand why Utkal entertained these men and what environments they navigated.
The Conceptual Terrains of Chalaki and Jugaad
By 2010, Utkal had acquired nearly all the land they would need, the Kashipur movement had collapsed and splintered into multitudinous group‑based actions that would define the region’s politics between 2010 and 2012 and so officials truncated the role of dalals and others who had helped the company break strikes (Dash 2023). It was not uncommon to find quotidian resistance: small groups of young men blocking roads, stopping company vehicles and demanding development and employment; and relatively educated adolescents and young men with the recommendations of PSSP leaders crowding the company lawns and looking for training, sponsorships or employment (Dash 2017). Utkal officials were prompt to call the police to resolve matters and, usually, able to deal with roadblocks, but when dealing with restless young men they seemed careful not to escalate tension in the area, and so they probably saw an opportunity in bringing men like Tiri and Juji in to mediate and resolve matters. Early in 2012 a group of young men from Tiri’s village manhandled the administrative officer on the company lawns; frantic company officials called Tiri and requested him to ‘come and help them’. Also in 2012, demanding development and employment, the villagers of Pitapada dug up the road to the company gates, and Utkal approached Juji. Juji recalled arranging a meeting between those villagers and the HR manager and that promises of work and contractual employment to eight village youth resolved the matter amicably.
To achieve their goals, chalak men leveraged their position as ‘men in the middle’ (Sud 2014) by helping villagers and the youth gain legitimacy and by using their familiarity with Utkal officials and the local policemen to impress villagers, particularly young men, and their embeddedness in the community and kinship ties with PSSP leaders to reaffirm their political position. As movement participants they had learned to speak persuasively, develop a healthy network of friends and well-wishers beyond village and kinship networks and work at the level of the community by bringing development work to the village. At the same time, they had closely aligned themselves to [the] interests of the young men (Noy 2022; cf. Krishna 2002; Thakur 2019). By facilitating access to Utkal bosses while navigating a risky environment, chalak men spurred young men’s aspirations of ‘doing well’ or finding jobs or improving their employability. At a broader level—and as has been documented in the context of mining (see Dhagamwar, De, and Verma 2003; Gardner 2012; Kirsch 2014; Noy 2022; Rajak 2011; Welker 2014; see also Parry 2020)—chalak men were part of the relationships of patronage, elite pacting, dependency and control established to manage truculent local men, prevent disruptive action and minimise opposition, such as the scuffles they had with officials.
The entrepreneurial logic of chalaki, much like that of jugaad, rests on the aspiration to do well in an uncertain future. The practice of chalaki demonstrates that it involves the recasting of attributes such as dispositions, tenacity and linguistic skills towards the cultivation of self, which drew from their participation in the movement that had spawned these new skills and networks. In jugaad, the idea of agency rests firmly on the moral decisions of the individual navigating insecurity and uncertainty (Jeffrey 2010; Jeffrey and Young 2014). In the case of chalaki, however, contrary to the logic of neoliberal governmentality, in offering construction contracts the company kept open a narrow window of gainful opportunities and engaged with young men directly, closely, daily to foster neoliberal subjectivities. These engagements are mediated by complex interactions between dispossession, educational attainments and participation in the struggle.
These patronage relations are not straightforward, however; they are made and unmade by a threatening police presence—for instance, Tikiri had one police station in 1999 but five in 2012. Demanding jobs, the villagers had blocked the road in May 2012; during the roadblock, there was a scuffle involving a senior company officer. The police issued an arrest warrant issued against Tiri, and he went underground fearing arrest. 16 Late in 2015, Juji was arrested on charges of ‘criminal intimidation’; he spent two weeks in jail. Speaking about the difficulties of his work, Tiri said, ‘They call us agya when a road is blocked or trucks are stopped. Once the situation eases, they call us maghya and send their dogs (police) after us.’ Such was the provisional, unstable nature of chalak men’s engagement with Utkal, as it used the carrot‑and‑stick strategy; and Juji and Tiri’s experiences show that the perils of functioning as a chalak person are much different from jugaad.
Despite such a complicated relationship, many chalak men had taken jobs at Utkal by 2018 and were ‘doing well’. Tiri joined Utkal in 2018 as a contractual power plant maintenance technician at a monthly salary of ₹20,000. He had married, his wife worked in the instrumentation department at Utkal and they had moved to a new concrete house in the village. Tiri still took construction contracts and supervised three sub-contractors, whom he paid based on the work done. In 2018, he got a commission-based assignment to distribute cows under a joint UAIL and Odisha Animal Husbandry Department scheme project. ‘[The] company is troubling us a lot. I want to leave it all. But, what to do? They will send police after us,’ Tiri said reflexively. Probably because he had been jailed, Juji considered working on construction contracts ‘a high-risk profession’ and he had quit it to join the company as a supervisor at a monthly allowance of ₹18,000. He, too, had moved into a concrete house with his wife, but in a neighbouring village. Although Juji did not think that Utkal would remove him, he was uncertain how long the job would last. Nearly 30 young men in the refinery area villages, whom Tiri and Juji had helped in obtaining sponsorships, had joined Utkal as contractual workers in 2017 and 2018 for ₹5,000. They seemed content to have jobs they had not hoped for. 17
Interestingly, even in 2018, the villagers did not refer to the chalak as dalals, or those who had acted in narrow self-interest and ‘sold their souls (to UAIL)’ (Jeffrey 2010; Levien 2018; Manor 2000; Reddy and Haragopal 1985; Baviskar 2004). Conceptually, the chalak appear to be closer to Krishna’s (2002) concept of naya neta (new leaders), young and educated men from the lower and middle castes in rural Rajasthan who provided services to villagers. 18 The chalak were still seen as people who instead of pursuing their own selfish goals brought development to their village and helped the relatively educated young men in the community obtain sponsorships (Noy 2022). Yet, in pressing claims of sponsorships, contracts and development on the company, these individuals navigated a high-risk, high-stakes environment every day that was both unpredictable and unstable (for the notion of straining, see Finn and Oldfield 2015). In contrast with the ways the naya neta related to bureaucracy and the villagers, and although the rewards were contingent and the environment risky, chalak men were embedded in the kinship and friendship networks they helped and developed to keep their position in the company, thus solidifying its presence and undermining the possibility of collective action.
Curiously, the PSSP leaders considered Utkal’s engagement with the chalak for personal gains selfish and ‘immoral’ (aniti) (Noy 2022). But the villagers asked, ‘What else is the way out?’; ‘we cannot just sit back?’; ‘the company has tricked us and taken away everything, how would we survive?’ In the context of jugaad, and by analysing morality and power, Beatrice Jauregui’s important ethnographic work on the police in Uttar Pradesh (2014) disrupts the distinction between virtue and corruption and suggests that in contexts marked by instability, iniquity and temporariness, jugaad entails not merely the transgression of moral boundaries but also a reconfiguration of boundaries. In corollary, chalaki is ‘even a virtuous practice’ (Jauregui 2014) in providing small windows of opportunity against the backdrop of dispossession and uncertainties. However, these windows of opportunity were conditional and exposed the glaring gap between the aspirations of young men and what they got.
Now we turn to these broken dreams.
V Falling Behind
Riju, a landless Dalit from Jirijhola in his late 20s who had dropped out of high school, farmed a small patch of government land and worked as a labourer along with his parents. When I met him on the refinery lawns in January 2012, he looked dejected because Utkal had stopped paying them a monthly allowance. They had gone to meet the HR manager to request its resumption. Each day, scores of young men in jeans and T-shirts anxiously waited for hours to meet Utkal officials (cf. Jeffrey 2010). When called, often, four or five young men would go inside to meet the manager and quietly hand him an application signed by PSSP or committee members before leaving. Most of these applications were for the resumption of allowance, sponsorships or jobs. The manager would reject most applications.
Riju and his family lived in a small mud house along with a few other landless Dalit families. The ongoing construction work excited Riju. ‘The area is developing a lot,’ he said, but he did not see his place in it (bhabisyata andhakar disuchi) (cf. Cross 2014). He said wistfully, ‘They are racing ahead, we have fallen behind,’ in an obvious reference to the fortunes of chalak men and those who have been able to find jobs in the company or sponsorships. As it were, the allowances given by the company had weaned most young men from farming and boosted their aspirations of doing well. He did not want to enter the dirty waters and farm or do kuli-majoori (wage labour) that he considered ‘demeaning and without respect’ (Levien 2018) or migrate for work (for a contrary explanation, see Shah 2010). The harrowing experiences of those who had migrated from the area to the fishing and glass industries in Kerala and Tamil Nadu were all too familiar to him. Riju wanted chakiri (formal sector employment) in Utkal (cf. Levien 2018). This also explained why the young men thronged the company lawns each day in hopes of obtaining sponsorships or contractual employment, which was perceived as a lottery to a good future (Finn and Oldfield 2015; Thieme 2018). Riju had asked Tiri for help but not received any. Taniya, a friend of Riju, said acerbically, ‘What would they gain by helping us? We are landless Domba.’ Taniya said that several Adivasi adolescent boys with the same educational qualifications had won sponsorships. While this was not correct, chalak men did seek to help their friends and kin, a narrow set of persons; besides, Utkal managers did not accede to all their requests.
Riju stopped going to the company lawns in 2014. He moved to Rayagada, to work as a hotel boy. The same year, Utkal acquired the government land his family and nine others tilled. Together, they staged protests demanding employment in Utkal but quickly dispersed when police arrived and threatened to ‘bury them alive’. In 2016, he migrated to a dye manufacturing unit in Vishakhapatnam, Telangana, where he handled metal pigment powder and mordant dye sacks. His monthly salary was ₹12,000. Riju’s mother died in 2018 and he returned home.. ‘Which girl would marry me?’ he said nervously, rubbing his hands, blackened and calloused by chemical burns. ‘Kashipur has developed a lot; it would be good if I could get some work here too,’ he said with a blank expression. Riju still considered himself better off than most of the other landless and uneducated Adivasi and Dalit youth. A number of youth who were either marginal farmers or landless and illiterate had turned into daily wagers at local construction sites. Some worked as cleaners and waiters at local eating-places or at hotels in Rayagada for precarious wages. A few others steal scrap from construction sites and sell it to middlemen. Many had migrated to faraway states as contract labour. However, many with land tilled it despite their lack of interest in farming and worked as wage labourers on the side (Levien 2018); they referred to their in-betweenness, as single and unemployed, as their ‘youth wasting away’. ‘Nobody has our back’, was how they commonly expressed their acute sense of despair at being abandoned by the state government, Utkal and the chalak (Finn and Oldfield 2015; Thieme 2013; Dolan and Rajak 2016).
At the Margins of Precarity
Since Utkal began operations in 2015, the labour demand at brick kilns and in the fishing and glass industry has increased manifold. The demand is seasonal. The labour market has spawned a network of contractors and agents who pay workers from southern Odisha an advance and transport them to workplaces (Mishra 2020; also see Mosse et al. 2005; Breman 1996). For these contract labourers, migration disrupts existing livelihoods, reduces regular informal work and raises the day-to-day need for cash, ultimately increasing precarity (Padovani 2016; for an excellent analysis of neoliberal capitalism as centring on dispossession, inequality and migration, see Breman 2019).
Ambi, a landless Adivasi from Kapadar who tilled the hill slopes as an adolescent, had hoped to do well but did not ‘have chalaki’. He spoke fondly of his experience of participating in the movement. Taking an advance of ₹45,000 from an agent in Koraput to tide over an emergency, Ambi migrated to Tamil Nadu to work on a fishing unit as a contract labourer. ‘It was my mistake to go to such a place, but we are fools. There were 17 of us, hauling and drying fish, endless work without breaks—we were like goti (bonded labour). I escaped with much trouble,’ he said bitterly in broken Odia.
The Kashipur police have been intervening to prevent such migration since 2017–18 at the behest of the district labour department. At the Tikiri railway station, on two occasions, they rescued individuals about to leave for Kerala to work in the dyeing and fishing industry. However, many young, uneducated, landless and unemployed men have no choice but work in exploitative labour arrangements.
VI Conclusion
This ethnographic paper aimed to explore and conceptualise chalaki to understand the conditions of its emergence in neoliberal environments and its implications for collective action. I attempted to comprehend the importance of chalaki as a tool for mobility to four young men and movement participants. Through vignettes, and by using a longitudinal perspective to map their divergent trajectories and the changes in their income and lifestyle, I showed that chalaki emerged as a new and important axis of difference expressed in terms of better life-chances for the four men. In contrast, however, the large majority became more vulnerable.
Chalaki did not emerge spontaneously in the volatile neoliberal mining environment where no front door was available; it was fostered by the deliberate actions of the company in the context of, on the one hand, the latent aspirations of young men and, on the other, exclusion and uncertainty. Paradoxically, all this occurred against the backdrop of the collapse of a movement that did not let the company set a brick in the area for 18 long years. Curiously, the villagers reposed faith in the ‘redemptive power of development—the rebuilding of the landscape and the reclothing of its benighted inhabitants’ (Crush 1995: 9).
Chalaki led to an environment of optimism, particularly among the relatively educated young men, over the prospect of undergoing technical training and finding employment. The mere presence of projects of dispossession in an area and the provision of opportunities—whether through allowances in the past or sponsorships and jobs in the present—spurred wide aspirations among young men and dimmed the urge for collective action. At the same time, the gap between what the groups—educated and uneducated, landed and landless, Adivasi and Dalits—aspired to and what they got widened over time. As the marginalised Adivasis and Dalits were excluded from the mining project, chalaki became an important skill and acquired salience as a strategy.
But most people—the uneducated landless, marginal or small farmers—were left to the mercy of market forces and subject to labour exploitation. Although some gained marginal economic mobility, the outcome—precarity in the region worsened—reveals that, ultimately, chalaki is futile. Collective claim making could have helped villagers to press Utkal to provide vulnerable groups rehabilitation and restitution in the form of employment, training and development (for an account of how the strikes in Kashipur forced the government to respond to the protestors’ demands in part, see Dash 2023). One hopes that the futility of such strategies in providing upward mobility will provide a reckoning or rupture of individualised negotiations with corporate forces and, ultimately, help communities understand that such strategies short-change their interests in favour of the company so that it can operate without opposition.