Ethnographic studies in sites of land dispossession for large capital projects have revealed the diversity of local political responses to this process, from fierce resistance to compliance. The theoretical challenge, in this context, is to trace the particular factors that affect this politics, and the conditions under which different reactions to dispossession unfold. Drawing on fieldwork in an Adivasi (tribal) village adjacent to an opencast coal mine in Jharkhand, India, this article seeks to contribute to this inquiry. It illustrates how, in a predominantly precarious labour environment, the possibility of formal employment as compensation for expropriated land, and the ways in which such employment enables class mobility, can play a salient role in shaping local political dynamics around dispossession. The analysis shows how, in the community studied, compensatory jobs for dispossession gave rise to new class differentiation and shifts in political relations that have acted to curb potentialities of resistance – precisely in a context in which opposition to dispossession could have otherwise been considered likelier to emerge.

India's adivasi, or tribal, communities have most often been depicted as homogeneous and egalitarian, at least compared to the entrenched social hierarchies that characterise rural caste society. This article draws on fieldwork in a mining-affected adivasi village in Jharkhand, eastern India, to consider how compensatory public sector employment for mining-induced land dispossession has contributed to new processes of stratification within adivasi society. On the one hand, compensatory employment allowed those who attained it to pursue increasingly common middle-class aspirations, and a considerable degree of class mobility. But on the other hand, it fostered new, enhanced forms of intra-adivasi differentiation -not only in terms of income but also consumption and lifestyle, education and children's life chances, and household and gender dynamics. New internal disparities, in turn, have acted to erode pre-existing elements of adivasi society that revolve around values of egalitarianism.

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores two widespread types of informal and precarious work in eastern India's coal mining tracts. It seeks to contribute to recent attempts to disaggregate the umbrella notion of precarity and the related concept of 'classes of labour' in the context of the global South. It does so by illuminating the more nuanced yet significant relative distinctions between different forms of precarious coal-related work as perceived and experienced by labourers. The article illustrates how labourers evaluate such forms of work in relation to one another in terms of relative stability, autonomy, tempo and gender dynamics, which affect their livelihood decisions and activities. It thereby turns attention to differentiating dimensions of precarious work that are easily veiled in broad debates about precarity and 'classes of labour'. Such dimensions are essential to probethrough comparative ethnographic study -to understand how people engage with different modalities of precarious work on the ground and how they configure their livelihood strategies in particular capitalist and social contexts.