“This will destroy Jeev and Jantu”: infrastructures of modernity across water, energy, and land in Jaisalmer, India

Abstract In the context of contemporary socioecological crises brought about through the political ontology of colonial capitalism, concerns about planetary conditions and their mounting pervasive impacts continue. Recognizing the rejection of natureculture as pivotal to the survival of current extractivist modalities, this paper delves into the infrastructural harm in the state of Rajasthan, intertwining developmentalism with ecological modernization. Despite India's myriad and diverse lifeways, coloniality's enduring grip on knowledge and being persists in the ostensibly “post”-colonial era. This influence is particularly evident in the transformation of lands used by resource-dependent agropastoralists first into “resource” frontiers (i.e., “wastelands”) and later into commodity frontiers (i.e., industrial water and energy infrastructures). Drawing on six months of cumulative fieldwork (2022–2024), this paper identifies the infrastructural harms stemming from water and energy infrastructures in Jaisalmer, India. While not exhaustive—in the presence of other concurrent military and industrial projects—first water and later energy industrial projects capture a larger pattern of cumulative effects of exchanging habitat for development. We argue that through an amalgamation of extractive projects that neglect place-based onto-epistemologies, in favor of modernist infrastructures, the national environmental politics temporally follows a trajectory of harms in India—renewing the harms of the past into present day harms for agropastoral futures.