Land as Private Property and Its Critique from Below: Notes from Assam, India

This article engages with the seeming contradiction of the institution of private property as representing security of landholding, on the one hand, and serving to legitimize the forceful takeover of land, on the other. It takes up three cases in Assam, India, to demonstrate the multiple shapes and forms in which insecurity of landholdings presents itself, to ask how claims to land are forged by cultivating classes and communities within these contexts. The article argues that peasants make claims over land in ways that challenge the central framing of private property, demanding rights in land by emphasizing the material basis of those rights that are actualized through labour towards social reproduction. These discourses, in the case of tribal, Adivasi and indigenous peasants in Assam, are then forged within a nationalist framing. Together, they challenge the fundamental abstraction central to framing land as a private property.