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.