This article explores the tensions between the statist project of securing national bodies—geopolitics—and the governmental project of securing populations—biopolitics. It is based on historical, public health, and ethnographic evidence from a coastal region of India with high background radiation, due to large deposits of thorium in beach sands. Thorium is a critical resource in the Indian state’s long-term programme of energy independence; long-term exposure to radiation is also what comes to define this community as a biomedically-induced population. This article shows that once thorium becomes identified as a state resource, the social meaning of place decays and the ability to imagine local futures becomes increasingly strained. The article concludes that the imperative of establishing a secure future for the nation–state requires that the future of this community be rendered in terms of sacrifice, an increasingly unstable trope of Indian nation-building.
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