Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine what it means to work as an Adivasi artist in post-colonial India and what it means to think about Adivasi art as ‘work’, especially in a context of socio-economic marginality which marked the ‘tribal’ or Adivasis as a negative and a-temporal cultural other.

Paper long abstract:

The article is situated in a Pardhan Gond Adivasi (‘scheduled tribes’ or ‘indigenous people’) art-world in central India. The analysis emerges from an ethnographic observation that artists refer to the process of art-making and the art-objects as ‘kaam’ or 'work'. I privilege this observation in my analysis to understand how the Adivasi artists invoked qualities of their work and its effect to claim a legitimate place and agency in spaces and institutions that have previously excluded them or represented them in essentialist frames. With ethnographic observations about the lives of artists, art-making, and the experiences of working in powerful state institutions, I examine what it means to work as an Adivasi artist in post-colonial India and the political possibilities in thinking about making Adivasi art as ‘work’, especially in a context of socio-economic marginality which marked the ‘tribal’ or Adivasis as a negative and a-temporal cultural other. I argue that the social category of work comes to have an emic relevance to the Adivasi lifeworlds and histories. It allows for claims and experiences of dignity in their labor, inclusion, and a rewriting of their historical representations. The article will discuss the kinds of everyday livelihood strategies and negotiations that previously marginalized communities in the global South (like the Adivasis) use to claim dignity and social inclusion; while at the same time, these strategies can further divide and produce hierarchies.