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Paper short abstract

How do communities convert crisis into consciousness? This paper analyses how UP's tribes, facing administrative erasure and faulty recognition, maintained cultural distinctiveness through resilience mechanisms.

Paper long abstract

How do communities transform conditions of extreme vulnerability into organized political agency? From 1950 to 2002, Uttar Pradesh’s tribal communities experienced systematic administrative erasure through misclassification as Scheduled Castes or Other Backward Classes despite documented tribal status in colonial ethnographies. This manufactured crisis denied approximately 2 million people their tribal identity and associated rights, creating structural vulnerability through exclusion from Scheduled Tribe educational reservations and employment quotas, alongside cultural delegitimation and political marginalization. Drawing on primary fieldwork, the paper documents how misclassification necessitated sophisticated resilience mechanisms: communities developed “dual consciousness”, strategically navigating imposed administrative categories while maintaining tribal self-understanding; preserved cultural practices including traditional Gondi marriage and death rituals despite Hindu assimilation processes; and transmitted collective memory of tribal heritage across generations, among other strategies. These survival mechanisms provided foundations for sustained political mobilization, culminating in a 52-year struggle that achieved partial Scheduled Tribe recognition in 2002. However, geographic fragmentation restricting recognition to 13 eastern districts generated new vulnerabilities and intra-community divisions. The findings reveal communities demonstrating remarkable cultural dynamism, selectively adopting certain Hindu practices while consciously maintaining tribal distinctiveness, neither assimilating completely nor remaining culturally static. Theoretically synthesizing cultural resilience and transculturation frameworks with indigenous rights discourse, the paper argues that vulnerability and agency are dialectically constituted, communities’ strategic navigation of constrained structures simultaneously reflects and challenges the power asymmetries generating vulnerability, with dual consciousness enabling survival even as partial recognition perpetuates exclusion.