Paper short abstract:

Based on long-term ethnographic field work around one of the region's oldest industries, the Rourkela Steel Plant, this paper seeks to explore the tribal perspective on industrial modernity in Orissa, on the diku state establishing it and on the brutal destruction and dispossession it unleashes.

Paper long abstract:

Since a century mining and metal industries exploit the rich coal and mineral reserves of northern and western Orissa. Anthropological-cum-activist accounts of the great transformation that is thus violently enforced upon local tribal societies usually stop with their displacement. Studies of tribal workers on factory shop floors and tribal life in the resettlement and labour colonies that have come up around them barely exist. Based on long-term ethnographic field work around one of the region's oldest industries, the Rourkela Steel Plant, this paper seeks to explore the tribal perspective on industrial modernity in Orissa, on the diku state establishing it and on the jungli, brutal destruction and dispossession it unleashes. The paper aims to investigate how the tribal reasoning on these processes differs from or conflates with other local and/ or academic accounts.