'From Barren to Beautiful': Land Fictions on an Indian Tourism Frontier

This article analyses the discursive and material work that land fictions perform in processes of land commodification and dispossession for large-scale tourism projects in the Indian state of Goa. Following recent work that conceives of land fictions as legitimating narrative, legal and regulatory devises that partake in the production of land as a commodity, we identify four distinct land fictions at work on the Goan tourism frontier: the clean-slate-as-treasure-chest fiction; the tenancy-free land fiction; the zoning fiction; and the forest fiction. These land fictions, we argue, in crucial ways underpin material practices that remove a series of barriers to the commodification of land. By seeing land fictions as operating in conjunction with and being conditioned by state structures, economic logics, class interests, and forms of ideological justification, the article also seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on regimes of dispossession and the land broker state in the Indian context.