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Paper short abstract

Adivasi communities in Kokrajhar use fluid and strategically fragmented identities to contest state authority and rethink development. This paper shows how their epistemologies unsettle dominant frameworks, offering situated, community-rooted alternatives for redefining what development can mean.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on long-form interviews conducted across Kokrajhar, a district within the Bodoland Territorial Council, one of the three autonomous councils in Assam, India, in 2024-2025, this paper examines how Adivasi communities produce, circulate and defend knowledge in ways that fundamentally challenge dominant understandings of ‘development’. In a region shaped by ethnic violence, contested indigeneity and shifting land regimes, Adivasi political actors engage in what I term fragmented indigeneity, the strategic movement between a broad collective identity (Adivasi) and specific community identities such as Santhal, Oraon, Munda and Kharia. Rather than signaling internal divisions, this fluidity operates as an epistemic strategy for navigating state classifications, resisting caste assimilation. The paper links this strategy to what I describe as development sovereignties, the vernacular modes through which Adivasi communities', assert their authority over land, forests and historical presence. These emerge from collective archives of displacement and violence, particularly the major cycles between the period from 1980 to 2014, as well as from daily encounters with intersecting land and forest bureaucracies. These epistemologies disrupt development models that assume stable administrative categories, fixed ethnic identities.

By situating Kokrajhar within broader Global South politics, where marginalised groups negotiate incomplete sovereignties, contradictory land laws, and violent development interventions, the paper shows how Adivasi knowledge unsettles Global North frameworks that privilege stability, singular identities. It argues that reclaiming indigenous epistemologies is not simple cultural recovery but a decolonial act that redefines who can speak, who is heard, and who has the authority to imagine development futures.