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Paper short abstract

Grounded in historical-anthropological research on the inclusion and exclusion of “Scheduled Tribes”, this paper proposes a framework to research citizenship for indigenous people in India, from colonial schedules and constitutional debates, to analyses of recent amendments to citizenship law.

Paper long abstract

In the context of the co-opted visions of decoloniality, rapid digitalisation of citizenship and welfare access, and historical land alienation, adivasis across India largely persevere with the contradictory promise and paternalistic governmentality of the state’s Tribal welfare schemes and other forms of social security. This paper outlines a theoretical framework to navigate the state-society relationship obtaining across the vast heterogeneity of India’s “Scheduled Tribe” population. Drawing on theories of citizenship and historical research, and necessarily engaged with questions of comparison, representation, and identity-based competition for resources, I ask: how are India’s adivasi communities responding to new representations of their identity, constructed through an overtly Hindu lens, amidst the rapid digitalisation of citizenship? This paper will compare how adivasis are drawn into, and respond to, polarising ethno-religious discourse, that is shaping the contours of contemporary politics. Given the context of heated public debate on who is included or excluded from the Indian nation, adivasi communities are new frontiers for political parties and nationalist movements, who claim them as original Hindus. Historicising the construction of “Scheduled Tribes” and associated characteristics and criteria within the ethnographic state, I map regional histories across three adivasi territories (Adilabad, Telangana; Mandla, Madhya Pradesh; and Gadchiroli, Maharashtra). With these comparative trajectories of the governmentalisation of tribal identity, I propose conceptualising a longer fragmented understanding of how welfare provision recirculates identities, languages, and practices of citizenship, and has profoundly shaped contemporary politics for people belonging to groups classified as “Scheduled Tribes”.