ABSTRACT This paper shows how India's wind electricity regime does not simply decarbonize electricity; it reorganizes power through a distinctive wind masculinity—a caste‐coded, infrastructural mode of rule that keeps money, machines, and people moving. It extends the notions of petro‐/solar masculinities to a South Asian scholarship on caste, Hindu nationalism, and rural patriarchy. Drawing on 7 months of multi‐sited ethnography in Kutch, Gujarat, the paper traces how wind's dispersed materialities elevate men who can convert engineering expertise, upper caste authority, party ties, and police access into uninterrupted logistical flows. Three empirical strands anchor the argument: (1) wind masculinities are extractive, where site‐making and engineers domesticate land and schedules; (2) they are caste‐coded masculinities, where dominant caste brokers perform the “dirty business” of energy politics; (3) Hindu nationalist masculinities take shape in border wind corridors, where saffron symbols and discretionary gaze mark Muslim villages as suspect spaces to penetrate, surveil, and reclaim.

Renewables in India are presented as modern technologies ensuring a pathway towards sustainable development and unlimited growth. But this story entails problematic land politics and the reconfiguration of space for resource frontiers' expansion, local state formation, and ethno-religious authoritarian agendas: for the past 20 years, Kutch district of Gujarat state in Western India has experienced several waves of land liberalisation and industrialisation programmes, including wind power projects, but its proximity with Pakistan and the presence of Muslim pastoral populations on both sides of the border have also fostered Hindu nationalist movements since 1947. The development of wind energy projects in Western India follows traditional patterns of a regime of dispossession: a set of "inscription devices" assemble and disassemble land in a discursive, bureaucratic, and violent way and affix an official stamp of legality on damaging mechanisms of dispossession within a state-specific regime. But as wind projects move to borderland territories, their associated regime of dispossession aligns with long-term exclusive ethno-religious conceptions of space as Hindu. The unfolding land politics endorses the Bharatiya Janata Party's electoral strategy to capture the remaining constituencies and co-opt minority leaders, while agents enforcing wind's regime of dispossession see an opportunity to assert upper-caste Hindu supremacy.

This article analyses the political reactions of Kutch district villagers, in Western India, facing wind turbine projects as a complex political terrain of resistance shaped by the materiality of dispossession and local configurations of agrarian power. I argue that the terrain of resistance got diluted and dispersed towards individual actions aimed at negotiating dispossession through caste capital, while other power and caste scenarios have rendered collective resistance movements possible, up to a certain point. Deploying a class-caste analysis of land conflicts in rural India, this reveals continuity not only with traditional agrarian struggles but also with caste politics and excluding forms of mobilisation.

Low-carbon mega-infrastructures constitute one of the main institutional responses to climate change in India's agrarian settings, as they are imagined around features of 'greenness' and 'cleanness.' But this story entails a problematic construction of land, the reconfiguration of space for extractive development, and a complete disruption of agrarian social structures around features of exclusion and dispossession. This research adopts perspectives from political ecology to understand the persistence of class-caste relations, the legacy of coloniality, and the new citizenship regime underlying 'green' extractivism in India's low-carbon infrastructures. Wind turbines align with broad ethno-religious conceptions of Indian citizenship and space as Hindu, and their expansion over new border areas serves nationalist projects of territorial reconfiguration, cultural identity revivalism, border-making, and Muslim populations' surveillance.

Renewables are imagined in India around features of 'greenness' and 'cleanness' and are presented as the modern pathway towards sustainable development and unlimited growth. But this shining story entails problematic land politics and the related (un)making of space for capital accumulation: previous property regimes and land uses are erased while a new set of land technologies and territorial rules legitimates land dispossession and the private takeover of commons. Wind infrastructures are specifically targeting (common) lands categorized as 'deserted', 'empty' and 'waste', and subaltern groups (tribal, pastoral and Dalit communities) whose livelihood practices have been historically described as 'unproductive' and 'backward'. These both violent and discursive logics of (neo)colonial and green energy land politics are mediated and fixed to the ground levels by powerful (land) brokers, contractors, wind companies' land teams and political mediators who embark land on its tortuous, bureaucratic and yet material journey towards clearing, cleaning and holding value. This article offers perspectives from political geography and critical agrarian studies to understand the territorial process, the persistence of class-caste relations and the legacy of coloniality underlying the land politics of green energy development in borderland India.

Nikita Sud describes her latest book as ‘a telling of the life of contemporary India, as if land mattered’ (p. xiii). In this book, set in the post-1991 era of economic liberalization, the multiple lives of land weave in and out of the workings of the Indian state, encompassing its operating technologies and idiosyncratic behaviours. The book draws upon long-term research in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, three states that have promoted liberalisation vigorously. Since land is a state subject in India, this research design provides the basis for an examination of diverse contexts around land policies and politics. Although the book is not set up to be a subnational comparative study, the multiple locations examined help Sud to present different configurations of the processes of development and change: a private infrastructure and manufacturing zone in coastal Gujarat, an industrial belt alongside a highway in Tamil Nadu, and a real estate and service sector in peri-urban Kolkata in West Bengal. The story of land, which the book casts as the story of India, is centred on a conceptual framework that presents five interrelated dimensions: enlivenment, territory, authority, property, and access and exclusion. Key to this framework is an understanding of land in relational terms, as never merely a ‘thing’. Sud situates her own approach to land within a larger tradition of ‘relational socio-nature’, where the materiality (in the sense of physical or manifest attributes) of nature, and our sociality (understood very broadly as social relations) are intertwined (Whatmore, 2002). Other scholars have also noted that ‘land never settles’ (Liboiron, 2021, p. 43), but Sud’s work documents the relentless efforts of a panoply of actors, both state and non-state, to settle land for the development projects of ‘New India’. It

"The Making of Land and the Making of India." The Journal of Development Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

"Mapping power: the political economy of electricity in India’s states." Contemporary South Asia, 28(3), pp. 418–419