Framing Kalahandi as an iconic backward district

Kalahandi, the very name, evokes a geography of hunger, a history of backwardness where repeated droughts have broken the backbone of a long-suffering population. Kalahandi is an erstwhile princely state that was incorporated into the Indian state of Odisha in the post-independence period. Since the mid-1980s, Kalahandi has hit the headlines in newspapers regularly for the repeated drought situation and for reported starvation deaths and child sales. Key to framings of Kalahandi as a land of drought, hunger, and deprivation were reports that came out of the Greater Kalahandi region surrounding starvation deaths and the distress sale of children in the mid-1980s. To understand the so-called failure of public action and state failure that makes the destitution of Kalahandi possible, this chapter maps the changing contours of state–society relationship. To study the state as it morphs on the ground, one cannot use only statistical abstractions or merely give accounts of the 'distortions' produced in 'the state' by 'the social'.