Large swathes of land have undergone increased land-use change for conservation and development-oriented projects, where the communities being displaced and dispossessed were historically categorized as ‘marginal’, their livelihood practices considered ‘unproductive’, and their lands termed as ‘waste’. In contemporary India, this expansion over land was followed by a process of establishing legitimacy through new sets of legislations and land technologies over previous property regimes that came under the control of the state and private actors, especially in the rural landscape. Drawing from the fieldwork done around a mining-adjacent village in borderland India, this research examines the political economy of adaptation practices in nomadic pastoral communities in the arid regions of Kutch, Gujarat. Using mixed methods, I show how changes such as sedentarization, non-farm livelihoods, changes in herd composition and forward market linkages have emerged in the village structure in an attempt to (re)orient or (re)negotiate their access to shrinking pastures. As they continue to resist and adapt to changes in their socio-political environment, households have shifted from being nomadic camel herders towards mining-industrial sector leading to significant change in both their livelihoods and identity. Through accounts from the everyday lives of Rabari herders, I explore these new patterns adopted by them to creatively (re)interpret external interventions. Moreover, this research offers perspectives from political geography and critical agrarian studies, to understand these new sites of transition post-dispossession of commons and the politics around it by complicating the image of pastoralists as being marginal, mobile and inherently vulnerable to change.
