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The Majuli island in the Brahmaputra river harbingers a wide range of attention across the globe due to its multiethnic demography sustaining in geographical exclusiveness as well as for bearing the cultural locus of the neo-Vaishnavite legacy. With State-sponsored impetus for making Majuli a 'tourist hub' and an 'ethnic destination', Majuli has witnessed a significant change in its physical infrastructure - with all-weather roads penetrating to the remotest corners and even to the edge of the river and the chars. The state of development in Majuli is often juxtaposed with the 'ethnic' or 'traditional' lifestyle of its inhabitants and thus, resulting in a patronizing gaze both from the State and the masses whose materialities are located outside the island body of Majuli. With the new bridge being constructed along Majuli's southern bank connecting it with Jorhat, the nearest urban node across the Brahmaputra river, there are different speculations and anxieties that loom around the inhabitants of the island. Encountering erosion and other hydrological effects of a youthful river like the Brahmaputra, Majuli's geographical size has been shrinking for decades, and this results in a perennial anxiety of spatial belongingness among its inhabitants. This paper shall try to assess that with different materialities and different land-ownership and use patterns, the desires and anxieties associated with the bridge remain a zone of contesting narratives. It shall attempt to shed light on the structural issue of underdevelopment and lopsided development in the postcolonial Indian periphery and its ecology-development relation,