Who Owns Your Land?

Land, Power, and the Quiet Wars of Belonging

By Kaushiki Ishwar 

Growing up, I witnessed the unrelenting weight of living without land to call our own. My parents, like countless others, struggled under the burden of exorbitant rent, pouring their hard-earned income into spaces they would never truly own. Every move, every payment, was a reminder of how tenuous our claim to stability was—how, without land, dignity felt perpetually out of reach. This journal was born from that experience.

In July 2024, I joined the Azadi Leadership Program only to realise that campaigning for social justice is beyond a personal revolution. With the help of the Azadi Team, I started working on building an independent publishing space for marginalized communities. Critikal & Theorie focuses on disseminating knowledge on philosophical concepts and critical theory to understand the capitalistic structures around us better. The publishing house is creating knowledge systems to break the heteropatriarchal hierarchies and arm the oppressed with tools of critique and information. The first edition produced by C&T’s ‘Who owns your land’ journal is a response to the quiet injustices I witnessed as a child, the quiet sacrifices of families like mine who are forced to fight for a foothold in a world that equates ownership with worth. For minorities and marginalized communities, the struggle for land is not just economic; it is existential. Land is more than property—it is a place to belong, a stage for dreams, a heritage to pass on. Without it, we are rendered rootless in systems designed to exclude us. The stories within these pages are a collective outcry against a system that perpetuates inequality and denies dignity to those without the privilege of ownership. They are also a testament to resilience, to the countless people who have refused to let systemic barriers silence their demand for justice. 

I started working with a team of 2 graphic designers, 8 proofreaders to compile, assess and develop 15 contributions on land hegemony and what it means to have freedom from alternative concepts. Land rights for minorities are not merely legal entitlements but acts of resistance against centuries of systemic dispossession and erasure. From a CritiKal & theorie perspective, land is not just soil but the foundation of identity, culture, and autonomy—realms historically denied to marginalized groups through colonialism, capitalism, and state complicity. This academic exploration deals with the right to land as a reclamation of agency and existence in a world that commodifies spaces while dehumanizing their rightful stewards. To restore land to minorities is to challenge the hierarchies of power that render them invisible, transforming land from a tool of oppression into a platform for liberation and justice. In curating these 15 contributions, our team not only examined the legal and historical dimensions of land but also sought to foreground lived experiences, oral histories, and indigenous epistemologies that resist dominant narratives. The process was intentionally collaborative; each designer and proofreader engaged critically with the politics of representation, language, and visual storytelling to ensure that the voices within these pieces were not diluted, but amplified. Through essays, art, and annotation, this body of work becomes a counter-archive, an act of defiant memory-making that reimagines land not as a static possession, but as a dynamic site of ancestral belonging, grief, and ongoing resistance.

This work, “Who Owns Your Land?”, ventures into this critical question, framing it through the lens of sociological and political theory. Drawing upon the intellectual traditions of critical theory, post-colonial critique, and political economy, this text examines the complex relationship between land ownership and systems of inequality, exploitation, and social justice. The first edition of land ownership is more than a matter of individual rights or property laws; it is about the historical, cultural, and political processes that shape access to land, often leading to unequal distribution, dispossession, and conflict. The book explores how these processes have played out across different societies and epochs, emphasizing the role of power and ideology in defining what it means to own land and who has the right to claim it.

This journal is not just about land; it is about the right to live with dignity. It is about the audacity to dream of a world where everyone—regardless of race, class, or creed—can stand on their own ground and call it home. This journal is a testament to diversity of work that concentrates the intricacies of what land and space is for them, it is an ode to spatial and temporal realities of minorities. With every word, we challenge the forces that uphold these inequalities, and we reaffirm our commitment to amplifying the voices of those too often unheard. This is our fight, our story, and our hope for a more just future. The Journal challenges readers to question the dominant ideologies that justify the concentration of land in the hands of a few, while others are left landless and marginalized. The book urges us to reconsider the possibilities for land ownership that prioritize collective well-being, ecological sustainability, and social justice over individual accumulation and profit. It advocates for a more inclusive and equitable vision of land, one that recognizes the importance of land not just as property, but as a shared resource that connects us to the environment. By interrogating the complex, often fraught dynamics of land ownership for the marginalised communities, this work aims to contribute to ongoing debates about land rights, social justice, and political transformation. It challenges readers to confront the systems of inequality that shape our world and to consider how we might collectively reclaim and reimagine the land upon which we all depend.

At its core, “Who Owns Your Land?” is not just a critical examination of land ownership but also an invitation to rethink the relationship between people, land, and power.

Kaushiki Ishwar (she/they) is an Azadi Leader 2024. They are an early-career scholar who has studied History and Philosophy with a minor in Sociology at Miranda House, University of Delhi. Aspiring to be a philosopher, critical theorist, and cultural critic, she focuses on cybernetic theory and systems thinking to decipher the structures that oppress the marginalized. They will start their journey as Young India Fellow at Ashoka University in July 2025erstanding contemporary issues in critical Pedagogy.