Paper short abstract:

Forest villages were established in state-owned forests in the late nineteenth century to meet the labour requirements of colonial forestry. This paper examines the evolution of property rights and access to cultivable land for Adivasi (indigenous) residents of forest villages in central India in the twentieth century.

Paper long abstract:

Forest tenure regimes in India reflect contested and messy legacies of colonial systems of property and power over rural landscapes. Forest villages represent a unique subset within this, since they were settlements established in state-owned forests to serve the labour requirements of colonial forestry. My research examines historical transformations in state-society relations and indigenous livelihoods in forest villages in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. The proposed paper seeks to intervene in debates about forest tenure reform in South Asia through an historical anthropology of land access and tenure in the forest villages of upland central India.

Adivasi (indigenous) labourers, who were settled in these villages, had limited access to cultivable land. Based on research in the state archives, I conclude that colonial forest officials relied on coercion, tenure insecurity as well as concessions to extract labour from the residents. I trace the micro-politics of tenure arrangements in the postcolonial period through ethnography in four forest villages. Following Hall, Hirsch and Li (2011), I argue that exclusion from land was governed by powers of force, regulation and legitimation. I highlight the difference between property and access, and the latter’s relationship with sub-national structures of power (Ribot & Peluso, 2003; Sikor & Lund, 2009). The ability of landless villagers to access land through “illegal forest encroachments” was contingent on local networks of patronage and shifts in state forest policy.

In the second part of the paper, I examine counter-exclusionary mobilisations that occurred in the forest villages in the 1990s, and the effects they had on forest access and tenure justice. I also locate the implementation of the national rights-based legislation for forest tenure reform (Forest Rights Act of 2006) in the contestations between Adivasi families, local state and indigenous rights activists in this upland landscape. Finally, I show why collective, inalienable land-tenure regimes, as envisioned in the forest tenure reform debates, might be difficult to realise in practice.