Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India

The contributions to this volume explore movements against capital and the state in contemporary rural India in three complementary ways. First, the simultaneous material and cultural claims of dispossession the movements make in particular rural contexts. Second, the new forms of organization that shape contemporary claim-making practices as well as political subjectivities in rural India. Third, the way the academia situates itself with respect to these movements, their organizations, activists, and participants. By delving into these relatively new and pertinent questions in the study of social movements in contemporary India, the contributors analyze the politics of subaltern agency, translocal activism, and academic knowledge-production in different, albeit interlinked, locations. The volume puts forth the argument that these are modes of political action that share complex relationships with each other, and may complement each other at times and yet contradict or even cancel out another at other times.