Along India’s infrastructure corridors, agrarian – urban and environmental transformation produces what this talk calls the infrastructural nation: an affective and authoritarian formation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on highway and urban expansion projects, it traces how land acquisition, demolition, ecological degradation, speculation, litigation, and unfinished infrastructure reorganise territories and multispecies relations while generating competing attachments to national and urban futures. Authoritarian legitimacy, the talk argues, rests less on coercion than on national belonging, property aspiration, and promises of connectivity. Yet the same corridors also open spaces for resistance and ecological counter-futures.
