Adivasis And The State

This work deciphers how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in India's Bhil heartland. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India.

This book looks at the contested relationship between Adivasis or the indigenous peoples, migrants and the state in India. It delves into the nature and dynamics of competition and resource conflicts between the Adivasis and the migrants. Drawing on the ground experiences of the Dandakaranya Project – when Bengali migrants from erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were rehabilitated in eastern and central India – the author traces the connection between resource scarcity and the emergence of Naxalite politics in the region in tandem with the key role played by the state. He critically examines the way in which conflicts between these groups emerged and interacted, were shaped and realised through acts and agencies of various kinds, as well as their socio-economic, cultural and political implications. The book explores the contexts and reasons that have led to the dispossession, deprivation and marginalisation of Adivasis. Through rich empirical data, this book presents an in-depth analysis of a contemporary crisis. It will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, South Asian politics, conflict studies, political sociology, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology.

In We Were Adivasis, anthropologist Megan Moodie examines the Indian state’s relationship to “Scheduled Tribes,” or adivasis—historically oppressed groups that are now entitled to affirmative action quotas in educational and political institutions. Through a deep ethnography of the Dhanka in Jaipur, Moodie brings readers inside the creative imaginative work of these long-marginalized tribal communities. She shows how they must simultaneously affirm and refute their tribal status on a range of levels, from domestic interactions to historical representation, by relegating their status to the past: we were adivasis. Moodie takes readers to a diversity of settings, including households, tribal council meetings, and wedding festivals, to reveal the aspirations that are expressed in each. Crucially, she demonstrates how such aspiration and identity-building are strongly gendered, requiring different dispositions required of men and women in the pursuit of collective social uplift. The Dhanka strategy for occupying the role of adivasi in urban India comes at a cost: young women must relinquish dreams of education and employment in favor of community-sanctioned marriage and domestic life. Ultimately, We Were Adivasis explores how such groups negotiate their pasts to articulate different visions of a yet uncertain future in the increasingly liberalized world.

In the Global South, indigenous people have been continuously subjected to top-down, and often violent, processes of post-colonial state and nation building. This book examines the development dilemmas of the indigenous people (adivasis) of the Indian state of Kerala. It explores the different facets of change in their lives and livelihoods in the context of modernisation under different political regimes. As part of the Indian Union, Kerala followed a development approach in tune with the Government of India with regard to indigenous communities. However, within the framework of India’s quasi-federal polity, the state of Kerala has been tracing a development path of its own, which has come to be known as the ‘Kerala model of development’. Adopting a historical political economic approach, the book locates the adivasi communities in the larger contextual shifts from late colonialism through the post-independence years, and critically analyses the Kerala model of development with particular reference to the adivasis’ changing political status and rights to land. It pays special attention to policy dynamics in the neoliberal phase, and the actual practices of decentralisation as a way of including the socially excluded and marginalised. Offering a theoretical elaboration of the interaction between class and indigeneity based on intensive fieldwork in Kerala, the book addresses adivasi development in relation to the general development experience of Kerala, and goes on to relate this particular study to the global context of indigenous people’s struggles. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of South Asian Development, Political Economy and South Asian Politics.

Landlock: Paralysing Dispute over Minerals on Adivasi Land in India explores the ways in which political controversy over a bauxite mining and refining project on constitutionally protected tribal lands in Andhra Pradesh descended into a state of paralysis where no productive outcome was possible. Long-running support for Adivasi (or tribal) land rights motivated a wide range of actors to block the project’s implementation by recourse to India’s dispersed institutional landscape, while project proponents proved adept in proposing workarounds to prevent its outright cancellation. In the ensuing deadlock, the project was unable to move towards completion, while marginalised Adivasi groups were equally unable to repossess their land. Such a ‘landlock’ is argued to be characteristic of India’s wider inability to deal with conflicts over land matters, despite the crucial importance of land for smallholder livelihoods and various economic processes in an intensely growth-focused country. The result has been frequent yet grindingly slow processes of contestation in which powerful business and state interests are, at times, halted in their tracks, but mostly seem able to slowly exhaust local resistance in their pursuit of large-scale projects that produce no benefits for the rural poor.

Adivasis have principally been studied in the context of rebellion, environmental history and the politics of identity. However, preoccupations with definitions and notions of identity, while important in themselves, tend to shift attention away from the inner lives of these communities. This book deals with different aspects of the histories of adivasi communities -- from Rajasthan in the west to Bengal and Orissa in the east. The essays in this book discuss a range of issues affecting the socio-economic and cultural life of adivasis and explore the long term continuities and discontinuities between different political regimes. They also reflect some of the new concerns that have come up relating to methodology and sources, historiography and colonial concerns, the impact of missionaries, gender issues, the agrarian situation, famines and migration. Some of the issues addressed in this volume are the genesis and development of 'tribal' studies in India during the colonial period; the peasantization of adivasi groups and their assimilation within the Hindu caste fold as reflected in Tulsidas' Ramcharitmanas; the work of the Protestant missions among the Santals of Chotanagpur; the social and ritual relations between the Bhils and the Rajput ruling dynasties of Dungarpur in southern Rajasthan; the aspect of agrarian change among the Hos of Singhbhum; the factors behind the migration from Chotanagpur, its nature and organization and its impact upon the adivasi village community; the question of women's agency in colonial Chotanagpur; and an exploration of land rights, witchcraft, employment patterns and how women challenged patriarchy in their everyday lives; and the impact of globalisation and liberalization upon adivasis in contemporary India. The book will be of use to students and scholars of history, anthropology and sociology and also to policy-planners.

Since the 1990s, the Indigenous movement worldwide has become increasingly relevant to research in India, re-shaping the terms of engagement with Adivasi (Indigenous/tribal) peoples and their pasts. This book responds to the growing need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India and defines a new agenda for Adivasi studies. It considers the existing conceptual and historical parameters of Tribal studies, as a means of addressing new approaches to histories of de-colonization and patterns of identity-formation that have become visible since national independence. Contributors address a number of important concerns, including the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries, and the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept. A series of short editorial essays provide theoretical clarity to issues of representation, resistance, agency, recognition and marginality. The book is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies.

This book engages with notions of self and landscape as manifest in water, forest and land via historical and current perspectives in the context of indigenous communities in India. It also brings processes of identity formation among tribes in Africa and Latin America into relief. Using interconnected historical moments and representations of being, becoming and belonging, it situates the content and complexities of Adivasi self-fashioning in contemporary times, and discusses constructions of selfhood, diaspora, homeland, environment and ecology, political structures, state, marginality, development, alienation and rights. Drawing on a range of historical sources – from recorded oral traditions and village histories to contemporary Adivasi self-narratives – the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, sociology and social anthropology, tribal and indigenous studies and politics.