Dispossessed

In 2005, in one of Bihar's poorest villages, starving members of the Bhuiya clan dug up a goat that had been buried for some time, cooked it and ate it. Within days sixteen people were dead, twelve of them children. This is one of the accounts in Dispossessed, a book about what it means to live at the very edge of Indian society.

Other stories follow. Bengali-speaking Muslims who had moved from West Bengal to Rajasthan in the 1970s and 1980s were declared Bangladeshi terrorists after the 2008 Jaipur bomb blasts, and they remain stateless in their own country. The landless Lodhas of Bihar, members of a former 'Criminal Tribe', still carry centuries of shame and dispossession. The book also tells of women with mental and physical disabilities in rural areas, homeless men living in Yamuna Pushta in New Delhi, and patients in a leprosy colony in Orissa.

These accounts show both stigma and support, hard lives, a corrupt and indifferent state, and moments of resilience. They come from interviews and conversations carried out for a study of destitution by the Centre for Equity Studies, and they give a wide view of what it is to be destitute, displaced and marginalized in India today.

The authors also turn the lens on themselves, reflecting on their own privilege in relation to the people they met. The book asks pointed questions about how India engages with those at its margins.