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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how colonial categories of "primitive" evolve into the contemporary state classification of PVTGs in India, showing how development institutions reproduce vulnerability and how PVTGs negotiate and adapt to these state-produced vulnerabilities.

Paper long abstract

Development institutions have conveniently utilised "vulnerability" to categorise populations, justify development interventions, and assess program outcomes. For example, the contemporary state category of “Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups” (PVTGs) in India is a replica of the colonial classification of "primitive." In the context of development anthropology, such a state of vulnerability is not an inherent condition but a structural production of colonial governance, post-colonial development interventions and a bureaucratic system of labelling certain sections of the population for governance.

Using the case of the Baiga, a PVTG in central India, the paper traces how colonial administrators, by labelling them “primitive,” confined them to Baiga-chaks (Baiga reserves) to restrict their traditional shifting cultivation, and how postcolonial governance reproduced similar logics by classifying them as PVTG. It illustrates how political and administrative decisions were used to "fix" vulnerabilities and regularise dependency.

The question that the paper answers is whether these state-produced vulnerability criteria actually represent forms of vulnerability for the intended communities or whether the state renders their culturally preferred way of living as a deficit. The state categories, therefore, mask the deeper politico-historical causes of the vulnerability they claim to address. Echoing Escobar's view of development as inevitable, the paper highlights how the "vulnerable" indigenous communities actively negotiate, adapt, and use their indigenous knowledge systems to claim rights and build resilience.