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Andrea Rota: Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of the IKOS Religion and Politics podcast. I am Andrea Rota, and joining me today is Chiara Arnavas. Chiara has a background in philosophy from the University of Padua in Italy, and in anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz and the London School of Economics. She's currently a PhD fellow at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asia, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo, where she's about to submit her dissertation on the emergence of criminal networks of land mafia in the Indian state of West Bengal. Her research examines how the illegal activities of these networks intersect with broader issues of religion, ecology, and politics. Chiara, welcome. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Chiara Arnavas: Thank you, Andrea, for having me here.
Andrea Rota: Let me start with a question about your case study. When I was reading about your work, I was struck by the depth of your fieldwork. You have been conducting empirical research in West Bengal since 2011, focusing on the development of a so-called green city and its surrounding villages. To begin, could you explain what a green city is and give us a sense of the geography you are working in?
Chiara Arnavas: Yes, of course. So let's start with the place, the geography. So I first went to Kolkata in the state of West Bengal in eastern India because I was really curious about the ways in which the vast deltaic wetlands, which is located in the eastern fringes of Kolkata, was actually being turned into a green smart city. You have to imagine that the East Kolkata Wetlands is this vast area that covers 125 square kilometers that extends in the east between the metropolis of Kolkata, which is a city of 14 million people, and one of the largest deltas in the world, the Ganga River Delta. So the East Kolkata Wetlands is located in between a city of 14 million people and this delicate delta region. And what happened was that since the 1990s, the West Bengal government started plans to build what has been called a smart green city. Throughout India, green cities have been presented as effective solutions to environmental challenges. And what they mean is basically that they should be sustainable urban projects that would obtain 100% of their electricity from renewable sources serve as hubs for ecotourism and, in an effort to find greener solutions to water pollution issues in India, have sustainable waste-to-energy plans and provide access to cleaner water for all. My field site, the East Kolkata Wetlands, has gradually been turned into the green smart city of Newtown-Rajarhat, which was the first green smart city of West Bengal and which has been recently acclaimed as an exemplary model of green urbanism for its environmentally friendly water management system and its sustainable green building model.And I was interested in understanding what the building of the green city meant for the local population of lower class, lower caste Hindu and Muslim farmers and fishermen. Because this project of green urbanism had turned fishing ponds and canals into lucrative, capital-intensive projects of eco-parks, eco-lakes or eco-urban luxury residential and tourist villages, especially for the middle and upper classes and upper castes. In the process, I observed how the local populations of farmers and fishermen have actually been dispossessed from their land and fishing ponds, and most of the existing residents have been left out from the benefits of the Green City and from the actual territory of the Green City. So I started observing how the old and new forms of inequalities were reflected into new spatial divisions and demarcations in the Green City.
Andrea Rota: That's fascinating. So what you're describing is a landscape of stark contrasts where very different ways of life coexist. How should we understand the emergence of these distinctions? Are there recent developments connected to the new green smart city or do they have deeper historical roots?
Chiara Arnavas: So, what I found was that from an environmentally point of view, While both Hindu lower caste and the Muslim previous farmers and fishermen have been dispossessed from their land, it was especially the Muslim local populations that suffered environmental exposure and have been exposed to toxic waters and environmental degradation on the margins of the Green City territory. And as I was trying to understand how this came about, I really understood that this was not just something happening out of nowhere, but it had deeper roots. And my interlocutors actually, you know, in the Muslim-dominated villages, often tended to refer to narratives of partition of India that happened in 1947, whenever they were describing what was happening to them and their ponds and their canals since the construction of the Green City. So how can we make sense of this? What did my interlocutor mean by referring to partition happening all over again in their wetlands today? And so I delved into historical archival documents and planning maps for the Green City, and this archival research allowed me to trace how the green city frontier was built upon a space that already had roots in spatial and social inequalities related to access to water and land. So the environmental inequalities that Muslim communities are experiencing today in green cities and projects of green urbanism in general don't just emerge in a vacuum. There are histories of water right disenfranchisement that don't simply disappear, but I show how they actually get enmeshed with and deeply intertwined with current neoliberal projects of capital accumulation in today's wetlands becoming green cities. My field site has actually been a Bengali Muslim dominated area already before 1947, already before partition. And since the 1950s and 60s, the Muslim population actually grew considerably in the area. Since partition, the Muslim population here was joined also by East Bengali Hindu refugees that were escaping East Bengal and moved here. The East Bengali refugees were resettled and rehabilitated in Muslim lands. So Muslims here suffered the first run of land dispossession by the state already in the 1960s. They were dispossessed of their fields and fishing ponds in the most fertile areas of the wetland. And they experienced confinement in more ecologically degraded and unfertile areas for fishing and agriculture. And only their villages basically were left intact.
Andrea Rota: So if I understand correctly, you are depicting the emergence of a frontier that is both ecological, economic and religious. Could you tell us a little more about how this frontier is shaped and how it evolved over time?
Chiara Arnavas: Yes, of course. So the shaping of the East Kolkata wetlands into a capital-intensive project of green urbanism, I argue, has carved onto space what I call criminalizing frontiers of environmental degradation. Looking at these frontiers can illuminate how religious difference is actually marked onto space. I consider these frontiers to be created at the intersection of different processes. So one is the one we've just discussed, the longer post-neo-colonial geographies and inequalities. Two, the way in which the state discursively produced religious difference by employing legal documents and planning maps for the green city that targeted and conjured Muslim communities as environmental threats. In these legal documents, every time the word environmental degradation or environmental pollution is mentioned, it is associated with Muslim-dominated villages or Muslim communities and their practices on the wetland. So by employing this discursive narrative, the state has actively basically legitimized the Green City Project and criminalized Muslim communities for their livelihood practices and relationship with the wetland environment. And this has really created a frontier. And by which I mean that it's a geographical separation. It's an economic separation because those living on the frontiers have no access to the benefits, lucrative lands or employment opportunities in the green city. And we'll talk about this later. And it's a religious frontier. Because Muslim villages are basically segregated and marginalized and are forced to leave along these demarcations, new barriers. So if you look at the maps of the Green City, you found all these demarcation canals that, funnily enough, demarcate the Green City territory the eco-parks, the eco-lakes, from the places where Muslims basically happen to live. And the Hindu Dalit villages are actually in a different location, integrated within the green city and much closer to the lucrative lands. So there's an actual active devaluation and segregation, unfortunately, targeting Muslim communities.
Andrea Rota: This context seems to provide a fertile ground for criminal activities. In your research you focus on the emergence of land mafia networks. Could you explain this phenomenon to us and how it contributes to maintaining religious and class segregation?
Chiara Arnavas: The term land mafia has really become a vernacular term in India. It's been widely used since the past 20 years, at least. Everybody has been talking about land mafias in India. But in the debates, this term is used in a bit of a vague way. And nobody I found really understand who these land mafiosi are and why they do what they do. And so as I was conducting my fieldwork in the wetlands and the Green City territory, whenever I asked former peasants and fishermen what their occupation was, they almost inevitably answered, we now work for the land mafia. And that applied especially for villages located on the frontier. So especially Muslim villages. And so I started looking at the literature on this and I found that what we know about mafia in general and land mafia doesn't really capture the reality of the people I have worked with and interviewed for over a decade now. Because when we think of mafias, we think of powerful bosses with authority and wealth. And that's where the focus has been for literature on mafia so far. So I started asking myself, okay, what does mafia and land mafia in particular become if we include the experiences of the people I'm meeting? The experiences of those who have been dispossessed from their fields and fishing ponds and are working for the land mafia and yet they're not benefiting at all and not becoming powerful or rich, right? So what does mafia become if we include these stories? And I found that the everyday experiences of lower class, lower caste farmers challenge what we normally distinguish between the victims of land mafias and the perpetrators of land mafia, perpetrators of violence and extortion because I found that victims of land mafia can be found not just outside of it, but within its own structure, within its own members. And this especially is true for Muslim lower-cost farmers. So in my work, I explain what I mean by lower-ranking land mafia workers, which are low-paid wage workers who are coerced into working for the land mafia because they can't find any other employment opportunity. And again, the discrimination against local Muslim farmers is especially high so that they are the ones who find it especially hard to find other jobs in the green city. They cannot do any other service jobs. They cannot work, for example, in the eco parks. If they manage to find work, they get fired soon after with often excuses that reveal some form of discrimination against them. And so gradually, mostly all the male members of Muslim families start working as construction workers for the land mafia. And they are the ones who bear the risks associated with the criminalizing label of land mafiosi. Because in newspapers, in media pundits, in movies actually, but also if you walk around the green city or you go in Kolkata or in general in India, I found that the image of the land mafioso is often associated with Muslim workers more than Hindu ones. In this scenario of land mafia that you are presenting, it seems that Muslims have left with very few possibilities or options to escape the system.
Andrea Rota: In your research, have you come across forms of resistance among Muslims living in the villages on the outskirts of the green city and what kind of resources they draw upon if they can resist?
Chiara Arnavas: Yes. So in my work, I ask, what are the possibilities of resistance? And I found that for those living on the frontier, they also shape the frontier itself geographically and politically in a way. The Muslim residents on what I call the frontier were engaged in forms of land and water reclamation. And I found that there are ways in which they're trying to reshape the frontier and respond to the criminalization they experience with their own alternative visions of the future. Many of my interlocutors drew from Islamic religious texts and Islamic idioms and code of conducts as a way to assert their belonging to the Indian nation and the West Bengal state and the wetland, of course. And in doing so, with their own forms of aspirations and practices, they shape the geography of the frontier from below. For example, in my informants accounts, many times they claim that in order to resist pollution and dispossession, people in Muslim villages need the Islamic virtue of firaza, which is the Urdu word for foresight. What is firaza? Firaza is a virtue, an Islamic virtue, that guides action through a vision of the future that has transformative effects on the present. For example, they were engaged in remaking new ponds out of wetlands. Plots of land that were lying there, not built yet, they could transform into smaller or bigger ponds. And once they managed to do that by pumping water from underground and turning a plot of land into a pond, it was more difficult for land mafia members to actually acquire and take away that plot of land because of a West Bengal law that recently
stated that fishing ponds cannot be acquired. So they're basically using the law at their own advantage here by framing what they're doing, these land and water reclamation practices, through Islamic idioms. Another thing that was framed through the idiom of Firaza was the transformation of burial practices, which relates to what we can see really as a segregation of the dead. So basically, Muslim graveyards have been often acquired by the state in order to be included in the Green City territory. And so what people are doing whenever they have the chance to still have a little space in front of their houses, literally in front of their door, they're burying their dad in front of their door in their gardens to reinstate their belonging to the place and to further prevent dispossession.
Andrea Rota: Thank you, Chiara. What do you think the future holds for this agglomeration and its inhabitants, especially in light of the current political landscape in India?
Chiara Arnavas: Yeah, so for one, I think it's really important to understand how this whole Green transition that's happening in India and the idea of green cities all over the country can hide direct environmental damage and degradation. And it is important to consider that religion is becoming more and more a marker for environmental inequalities where being Muslim is actually turned into an essentialised and exploitable category. So we need to pay attention to the unprecedented exacerbation of ecological despoliation and exposure to unsafe environments, not just in India. And also, I think it would be important to better understand possibilities of resistance for the future. Because I think we're in need of more explorations of how residents on frontiers of environmental degradation can engage in forms of resistance and how religion can be a way to express these forms of resistance.
Andrea Rota: Thank you very much, Chiara, for sharing your insight with us and your critical views and for helping us better understand how religion, politics, economy and ecology intersect.
Chiara Arnavas: Thank you for having me, Andrea. It's been a great discussion.
Andrea Rota: This wraps up this episode of the podcast.
Our guest today was Chiara Arnavas, a PhD fellow at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asia and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. You can find more information about her research in the episode description, including a link to the Nordic Asia podcast, where Chiara discusses additional aspects of her work. Thank you for listening, and until next time,