Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on a close study of Birsa Munda's ulgulan (1895-1901) to critique secular-rational notions of politics that underpins much scholarship on millenarianism and social protest during capitalist agrarian transformations.

Paper long abstract:

The capitalist transformation of the countryside has, historically, been accompanied by apocalyptic visions of prophets seeking radical democratic futures. The history and theory of "millenarianism" draw as much on the examples of the Anabaptists and Levellers in Reformation Europe as the Sioux Ghost Dance and the Maji Maji uprising. These examples highlight the strikingly similar material contexts and cultural forms. Yet they also insist on what Eric Hobsbawm famously termed "primitive rebels," inchoate and pre-political actors in a social landscape not marked by the demonstrable modernity of class struggle

Subaltern Studies advanced one of the first critiques of the notion of primitive rebels. For Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, millenarian prophets and the followers, far from being pre-political, had overtly political aims guiding their everyday actions. For the Subalternists, the politics of primitive rebels revealed themselves uniquely in millenarian moments of madness directed against the modern state and the capitalist world economy. "Politics" here, as for earlier scholars of millenarianism, was a wholly secular, rational-instrumental affair. What the politics of class struggle meant to Hobsbawm thus came to be analogous to what the politics of anti-colonial resistance meant to the Subalternists.

This paper questions the secular notion of "politics" that underpins much scholarship on millenarian movements during capitalist agrarian transformations. Focusing on the Birsaite ulgulan in colonial Chotanagpur, I seek to understand what millennial visions mean at the level of belief and praxis to their adherents, and how these visions contain an eschatology of radical democratic futures.

Paper short abstract:

Adivasi labour migrants in the Andamans settled down in the margins of state and society. While political discourse constructs them as “backward victims” of development, this paper argues that their marginality is a result of conscious forms of subaltern state evasion and a longing for self-rule.

Paper long abstract:

Capitalist development in Andaman relied on territorial expansion into rainforests. Large-scale rehabilitation settlements of refugees, repatriates and landless people, as well as the timber industry depended on footloose labourers from Chota Nagpur, the so-called Ranchis. These subaltern "hill coolies" from a large array of different groups were contracted by the Catholic Church in Ranchi. From the beginning, their relationship to state and society was defined by their entrance into relations of production as subaltern aboriginal labourers. Aboriginality was the main criterion for their suitability to work in the ecological niches between settlements and forests.

Contrary to official expectations, many circulating labourers dropped out of contracts and encroached forest land. Subsequently, both Ranchi forms of place-making in the margins and the racial division of labour cemented structural inequalities throughout several generations. Most Adivasis have, thus, been excluded from the lines of social mobility. As a consequence of their permanent failure to co-opt and control around 50.000 Ranchis, state, Church, and NGO officials attribute Ranchi "backwardness" to aboriginality, primitiveness and to their victimization by modernity. Such patriarchal views, however, have never considered that people might prefer to live in autonomy from the state by taking recourse to subsistence practices and consensual decision-making. Their "backwardness", I argue here, can, therefore, not only be attributed to structural inequality. Far beyond, it is a result of the very act of evading the state and its institutions.

Paper short abstract:

This paper would analyse the different renditions of their past by the Tana Bhagats of Jharkhand in order to make sense of how histories and memories of adivasi movements are reworked in post-colonial times.

Paper long abstract:

The Tana Bhagat movement, as the colonial archive suggests, began in 1914, almost a hundred years ago. Even today, the Tanas, as a political community, continue with their struggles in the Ranchi, Hazaribagh and Palamau districts of Jharkand. Fractured into small groups and sharing different sets of grievances, they legitimise their demands and claim redress from the Indian state on the basis of a history that they chalk out for themselves. But this construction of the past is often different from that provided in official correspondence, ethnographic reports, anthropological accounts and missionary writings, 'sources' crucial for the historian's construction of Tana pasts. Drawing as they do on the memories of events passed down generations, but carefully reordering these in conjunction with events relevant today, the Tana Bhagats narrate their history at ritual gatherings, and record it in pamphlets that they distribute during demonstrations on the streets of Ranchi, in petitions that they submit to government officials and politicians. These references to the past, I would like to argue, though not always mutually exclusive, are at times historically framed, at times carefully crafted, at times consciously evocative. Drawing upon Tana pamphlets and petitions, testimonies in courts during legal battles, and my own ethnographic experiences, this paper would analyse the different renditions of the Tana past in order to make sense of how histories and memories of adivasi movements are reworked in post-colonial times.

Paper short abstract:

The recent Klondyke mining rush is affecting several states in Eastern India. This paper looks at the mining policy in the Jharkhand region in the twentieth century in the context of debates on internal colonialism, resource exploitation and state policy.

Paper long abstract:

With progressive liberalisation and trade links with world economies India is being transformed at an unprecedented rate. Landscapes and livelihoods are being significantly impacted on by this pace of change. One such area is the predominantly tribal area of Eastern India (Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand) which is undergoing extensive mining development, including by companies such as Vedanta and Tata that are listed on the London Stock exchange.

The most mineral rich areas of central India are also the areas of greatest forest diversity and tribal population. As tribal communities are displaced, their land and resources taken over for mining and metal factories, their lives are changed at every level. From a livelihood based largely on self-sufficient subsistence agriculture, supplemented by hunting and gathering in the forest, they are forced to become industrial labourers, living in resettlement colonies in swiftly industrialising areas, where poverty takes a radically different form from anything they knew before. The proposed paper aims to offer fresh models to analyse the complex changes facing the region's indigenous inhabitants. There have been few studies to date of the effects of mining on livelihoods and environment in South Asia. By examining the relationship between social structure, environment and cultural history and the impact of mining in these the research poses important analytical as well as empirical questions concerning the effects of industrial developments and globalisation on 'displaced livelihoods'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper asks whether the Forest Rights Act (FRA) passed by the Government of India in 2006 could provide effective access and ownership rights to land and forests for the adivasi communities of Wayand thereby leading to an enhancement of their entitlements and livelihood security.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks the question whether the Forest Rights Act (FRA) passed by the Government of India in 2006 could provide effective access and ownership rights to land and forests for the adivasi communities of Wayand thereby leading to an enhancement of their entitlements and livelihood security. The FRA , it would seem, provided an easy escape route for the Government of Kerala, which was grappling with the stalemate in the implementation of its own laws vis-à-vis adivasi land rights, due to organized resistance from the non-adivasi workers employed in the plantations that were meant toprovide employment for adivasis, as well as the settler farmers. While granting nominal possession rights to the dwelling sites of a small community of adivasis (Kattunaicker, who are traditional forest dwellers), the FRA has failed to provide them with substantive access and ownership rights to land and forests. The paper argues that the FRA has a constraining rather than an enabling effect on the ongoing emancipatory struggles of the adivasis of Kerala.

Paper short abstract:

An analysis of the landscape and geography of violence associated with adivasis in the Red Corridor. An attempt to connect historic millenarian responses to the arrival of the East India Company in the Chotanagpur Plateau with adivasi responses to mining companies and Maoist movement in Jharkhand.

Paper long abstract:

The paper seeks to explore the landscape of the Red Corridor through connecting adivasi-led millenarian movements that responded to 'the coming' of the East India Company in the Chotanagpur Plateau with the current phase of the Maoist movement and its response to the advance of mining companies in Jharkhand. To connect the two, the paper uses Hobswam's(1959) observation that millenarian movements turn into or are absorbed by modern revolutionary movements, abandoning their chiliastic ideology for a more secular, modern theory for revolution.

With the coming of the millennium, globalisation is again experienced by adivasis through the interests of 'The Company', its agents and facilitators, including a new state. Through documenting responses from mining districts in Jharkhand with a millenarian history, the paper aims to answer the following- has there been a transformation in adivasi perceptions of the company? do adivasis recall their millenarian past to make sense of their present, particularly adivasis affected by mining? is the Maoist movement seen as a likely or successful medium to articulate existing adivasi views of company and State? how do adivasis perceive their futures in the wake of expanding mining interests, State responses to the movement and the demands of Maoists? And lastly, is Hobswam's observation applicable in the case of the Maoist movement in Jharkhand, has it absorbed the Chotanagpur Plateau's millenarian movements and strengthened amongst adivasis because of their encounter with globalisation? An analysis of emerging views may connect the colonial and post-colonial worlds of adivasis in Jharkhand.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the identity politics of Adivasi communities, the modern state of Tamil Nadu and a recently invented pan-tribal religious discourse. Analysing postcolonial identity politics in terms of practical reason it shows the postcolonial terrain as a struggle for visions of a 'good life'.

Paper long abstract:

In the northern Nilgiris of South India the post-colonial state, indigenous Adivasi communities (here the Jenu Kurumba) and pan-cultural religious discourses are engaged in a vibrant politics of identity. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the area I suggest to understand this kind of politics in terms of what has been called "engaged practical reason" (MacIntyre 2009, Taylor 1989, Demmer 2013) which recognizes the fact that, as in other non- and post-colonial localities across the world (Escobar 2008; Friedman 1994) this one is pervaded by multiple and different imaginations of a "good life". In particular this paper shows how all of these actors articulate a politics of practical reason in performative arenas. The latter constitute 'arenas of argumentation' and public deliberation where actors, verbally and non-verbally, create and imagine ethical visions of a good and proper life. Yet, there is a distinctive political drive to that ethical landscape as these visions relate to one another in terms of hegemonial attempts, collaborative action and resistance. This 'reaching out' implies a political process of challenging other visions of good life in the area all of which appear as ways to negotiate, respond to but also to challenge other versions of a "good life". Exploring the identity politics in terms of struggles of practical reason the paper responds to James Clifford's call to take 'identity politics seriously' (Clifford 2000).