The spatial turn in social sciences during the 20th century expanded our horizons to look beyond the established patterns of knowledge and methodologies; furthering our epistemological and ontological understandings. Such a process enabled us to look at situations and entities with elements of fluidities and fluxes in newer ways. In such a framework, scholars are attempting to re-interpret the binary of land-water in scapes where they intermingle in liminality, questioning thereby the binary associated with defining terra firma.The bounded border of land and water is being questioned methodologically, in order to understand this simultaneity. The fluidity of border between land and water here recreates a hybrid scape that negotiates the flux and challenges the hierarchical methodological systems.
Does such scapes associated within the imaginings of Anglo-Saxon modernity? Do we have their references in the sustainable development goals? How are they represented beyond the geomorphic silos as lived-in spaces where silt, clay and water intermingle beyond the wastes of modernity? Do we have a sustainable understanding of how life sustains in such inhabited specs on maps?
The presentation deals with such wastes of modernity in the river valleys in eastern and northeastern India. The marginalities of existence and thoughts of mainstream discourses are dealt with here along with the complexities of such ‘ungovernable’ margins as centers of life, livelihood and living along with its relational dialectics.
