Paper short abstract:

A feminist analysis of the co-constitution of ethnicity and indigeneity in the frontier hills of the Indian state of Meghalaya through an examination of the Lineage Act, 2005.

Paper long abstract:

The Khasi, Jaintiah and Garo hills, that form the state of Meghalaya, in the north eastern borderlands of India were geographically produced as a frontier in the colonial period and have been marked by historical and historiographical marginalization. Recent studies on the region that emphasise the discursive importance of 'indigeneity' remain at an impasse as they are yet to fully engage with the longer colonial roots of "tribal" subjectivity in these borderlands. Some scholars have highlighted the heterogeneous contexts in which reified categories like "tribal" and "adivasi" have been produced. This paper contributes to this scholarship through a feminist analysis of the co-constitutive concepts of ethnicity and indigeneity and intersecting identities in the Indian state of Meghalaya. I examine the production of a gendered indigenous identity in the state of Meghalaya by focusing on a legislation called the Lineage Bill 2005. The Bill passed by the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council imposes strict control on marriage choices of women in this matrilineal society with an aim to prevent the misappropriation of property by non-tribal and non-Khasi men. The Bill is an entry point into questions on gender and property relations in this frontier state, and the relationship between legal pluralism, democracy, and nation building.

Paper short abstract:

We leverage variation in social norms related to inheritance and wealth management among matrilineal and patrilineal tribal groups in Meghalaya in order to study the determinants of the gender gap in political economy preferences and behavior.

Paper long abstract:

What explains the gender gap in policy economy preferences and political engagement? Isolating the origins of the gender gap is fraught with methodological difficulties because the determinants typically evoked by scholars—economic resources, social norms, and political institutions—are difficult to disentangle. We leverage the unique cultural setting of Meghalaya, in northeast India, where the world's few remaining matrilineal tribes live in close proximity to patrilineal communities. By exploiting variation in social norms related to inheritance and wealth management, we are able to better identify the relationship between social norms, material resources, and political economy preferences and behavior. Using extensive survey, experimental, and qualitative research, we show that the gender gap in preferences about the welfare state closes completely in matrilineal tribes, even while it remains strong and comparable to gender gaps across the contemporary world in patrilineal groups. Secondly, in the domain of political engagement we find that the typical gender gap reverses. Our findings indicate that social norms can determine political economy preferences and behavior via their effect on material resources.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper using ethnographic methods I argue that indigenous women of Attappady Hills South India are resisting settler colonialism through environment practice and creating new history of decoloniality.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I argue that environment practice can become point of entry for indigenous women to resist coloniality of power. Few indigenous women living in the Attappady hills of South India, part of one of the important biodiversity sites of the world have developed pro-environment practices that help reinforce their indigenous culture, protect their biodiversity and critique the project of modernity ushered in by the British and continued by settler colonialism. Even as commercial monocrops and use of pesticides ushered in by settlers have become the rule, a section of women are using practices and language associated with sustainability to question power. For instance there are women who got into traditional healing harnessing ecological knowledge. Women of an entire village planted saplings on a barren hill and transformed it into a forest. Other women do organic cultivation and have even given up their livestock. Through their lived experience with the environment they understand that they are caught in a web of power and dominant knowledge. Using ethnographic methods this paper examines resistance in the environment practice of these tribal women as a decolonial project. The environment practice of these indigenous women is also an integrating ecological feminism that links women, culture and nature uniquely.

Paper short abstract:

The paper shows how the Santals frame their own idea of environmental justice to answer to state policies.

Paper long abstract:

I shall engage with different archives to show how indigeneity was constructed by the Santal themselves under different figures such as rebels and prophets during the second half of the nineteenth century.

I shall unravel how Santal knowledge revolves around two dimensions, an emergent historical consciousness and a feeling of shared identity which informs Adivasi resistance to-day, forging an Adivasi sensitivity, a way to grasp conflicts over natural resources. I shall examine how the Santals have engaged in participatory resource management setups as agents to negotiate with the structures of power and dominance.

Using examples from different regions, I argue that state environmental justice appears contradictory to the social actors. This lack of transparency tends to create environmental movements, often seen as articulating cultural opposition to an economic understanding of the environment. I propose to show how the Santals frame their own idea of environmental justice, through a pluralistic perspective which takes into account a critical engagement.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the current internal dynamics of Adivasis identity and representation in a challenging environment of land limitation and conservation excesses in Kerala. It examines how the mobilizing strategies reshape the political identity.

Paper long abstract:

The actual debate about indigenous identities has been linked with the twofold ideas of modernity and tradition. This debate has attempted to explain how indigenous societies -the councils of tradition- represent themselves by accepting, re-signifying and incorporating cultural elements. Recalling their customary belongings, indigenous peoples in India have recognized themselves as the "first inhabitants of the land" under the uniform term of Adivasis. This formula, besides having an intricate subjective origin, has also a well-defined political objective: reclaim their denied rights and look up for equality among the castes. In Kerala, a state that hosts a vast area of ecological fragility -the Western Ghâts, an Adivasis traditional habitat- the government has established a rigorous mechanism to control these areas under the label of conservation. As a consequence, during the last years, Adivasis have focused those demands particularly in relation with land access that has become a critical issue on grounds of the neglect of their effective inclusion on the tenure system. The strategies mobilized by Adivasis to overcome this condition are heterogeneous and have shaped a particular deployment of responses from within the same communities creating fragmented political identities. These identities are correlated with the sub-caste structure that shows a well-differentiated access to land and, thus, unlike intensities of participation, claiming and protest. Which is the current political situation of Adivasis? How the means of resistance shape the political identity of the Adivasis in a context of reduced land access?

Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with adivasi politics in the Odishan steel town Rourkela, focusing on trade unions aiming to defend adivasi steel workers and ‘cultural associations’ promoting the ‘development’ of adivasi communities, and on their respective relations to the politics of the adivasi urban poor.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on adivasi politics in the Odishan steel town Rourkela. Built by a central government undertaking in the 1950s, the steel town and the public-sector steel plant it accommodates were icons of the Nehruvian developmental state. They were to provide India with an essential commodity to back her newly gained political independence; and they were also to provide the nation-state with an industrial working-class to serve as a modern, secular and 'socialistic' model for the citizenry as a whole. Situated in the mineral-rich, but sparsely populated internal periphery, the local steel industry would necessarily have to rely on migrant labour from all over the country as well as the local adivasi. Work in a modern, state-run steel plant and life in a modern, state-planned steel town would transcend the various 'traditional' identities of caste, region and religion of Rourkela's industrial workforce. Nevertheless, since the beginning the steel town has exacerbated conflicts between 'sons-of-the-soil' and 'outsiders'. The paper focuses on these conflicts and on their changing intersection with class inequalities in Rourkela. In particular, I will focus on the actors raising claims in favour of Rourkela's adivasis in this regard, i.e. on trade unions aiming to defend the interests of adivasi steel workers and on 'cultural associations' promoting the 'development' of adivasi communities, and on their respective relations to the politics of the adivasi urban poor.

Paper short abstract:

An engagement with adivasi resistance over land acquisition in Jharkhand.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past few decades, post colonial India had unravelled itself in the most dramatic way against adivasi settled in the remote areas of the country. There are often forced, rendered to liminal spaces that not only reduce their political subjectivities but also engender them as development subject. Such interventions are often anchored through policies that are eulogised in the name of 'national interest' and feed into middle and upper class gentry of the country. Against this background, I want to propose that Land Acquisition which seems to simmer on the floor of Indian Parliament is highly pernicious in nature and fraught with innovations like 'public purpose' which rationalises dispossession. This paper is built on my field study of Nagri village in the terrain of Jharkhand where Land acquisition has been used against adivasi to acquire land for 'development'. The paper also engages with recent developments within the act and how it reflect of a clear intersection between post colonial power elites and global capital.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on everyday interactions between Lutheran and Jesuit missionaries and newly-defined 'tribal' communities in colonial Chotanagpur. These interactions, I argue, cannot be simply viewed in isolation from the political economy of agrarian change in this eastern Indian region.

Paper long abstract:

Postcolonial historians have tended to share, somewhat uneasily, with the Hindu Right a particular view of Christian missions as handmaidens of empire in British India. In the annals of subaltern studies, too, there exists a conspicuous silence on missions, which is surprising because subalterns in colonial India converted to Christianity in fairly large numbers. Beyond South Asia, the Comaroffs famously argued that Christian missions in southern Africa contributed to the 'colonization of consciousness' there.

Recently, however, such settled historical truths are starting to be unsettled. Historians such as Tanika Sarkar, Geoffrey Oddie, Saurabh Dube, Sangeeta Dasgupta, Rupa Viswanath, and David Mosse have questioned the easy equation of missions with empire in South Asia. This paper builds on their work by focusing on everyday interactions between Lutheran and Jesuit missionaries and newly-defined 'tribal' communities in colonial Chotanagpur. These interactions, I argue, cannot be simply viewed in isolation from the political economy of agrarian change in this region. From the mid-nineteenth century, Christianity emerged as a powerful resource for those forest-dwelling groups that the Raj christened 'tribes' in an ongoing war over property rights with their upper-caste Hindu zamindars. German and Belgian missionaries were, willy nilly, forced by their new wards to enter the arena of agrarian conflict, often against their will and sometimes at odds with the Raj. At the same time, the missionary interest in codifying 'tribal' languages and comprehending local theological traditions produced fresh cultural-religious resources for 'tribal' subjects who sought to pursue a new politics of difference.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses some of the landmark legal battles amongst adivasis over claims to land, laws of inheritance, and contests over electoral seats. In this context, it will analyze the anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy's texts which shaped legislative and judicial opinion.

Paper long abstract:

By taking up some of the landmark legal battles amongst adivasis over claims to land, laws of inheritance, and contests over electoral seats, this paper will discuss how administrative-legal regimes have led to the making of adivasi identities in colonial and post-colonial times. Such cases point towards the ways in which different groups within the adivasis have sought to negotiate with the state and claim for themselves a 'tribal' identity, excluding others to similar claims in the process. Ultimately, the debates reflect a clash of dissenting voices and raise a fundamental question: who has the authority to speak on the tribal question? In this context, I will analyze some of the writings of the anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy, whose texts were seminal for legislative and judicial opinion. And yet, Roy's understanding of the 'tribe' shifted as he interacted with different worlds constituted by both adivasis and non-adivasis.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that it was the agency of the tribal people which eventually made scheduling a politically expedient move for the Congress Nationalists. It recapitulates emerging Adivasi readings of history, constitutional deliberations, communist led movements and analyzes the activities of Jaipal Singh.

Paper long abstract:

By the early 1940s, the discourse on the future of tribal communities in India had matured substantially leading to the emergence of binaries such as 'Protection versus Assimilation'. In essence, what began as a debate on the scheduling of predominantly tribal areas gained considerable currency and generated bitter contestations between the Nationalists on the one hand and the sympathetic 'Official Block' on the other. As a result of this dialectic, the 'tribal question' indeed came of age. However, its resolution through special provisions enshrined in the Indian Constitution (namely the Fifth and the Sixth Schedules) remains unexplained: why did the Indian National Congress which had maintained a fairly consistent policy of opposing the territorial segregation of tribal tracts in British Indian Provinces agree to provisions for scheduling? In this context, there is an urgent need to evaluate the role that tribal peoples themselves played in the twilight of colonial rule.

This paper argues that it was the agency of the tribal people which eventually made scheduling a politically expedient move for the Congress Nationalists. Moving through several interrelated themes, it recapitulates voices of tribal representatives about a communitarian Adivasi history, summarizes the final stage of colonial administrative discourse which fed deliberations of the Constituent Assembly of India, surveys the major communist led movements in tribal areas (1945-50) and finally enquires into the charismatic figure of Jaipal Singh who emerged as the leading tribal leader.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between processes of state-making and the shifting claims of identity among the Kudmi-Mahatos, a middle peasant group in eastern India.

Paper long abstract:

The colonial classification of tribes and castes produced rival claims from groups which were slotted into these categories. The Kudmi-Mahatos, a community of cultivators in the forest estates of central and eastern India, were identifies as 'tribals'. However, the community elites participated in movements to seek the status of Kshatriyas or warrior castes within the Hindu fold. In the 1931 census, the Mahatos were removed from the list of Scheduled Tribes (ST). However, in the postcolonial period, Mahatos in West Bengal began to demand ST status. In the present, this demand is routed through a display of animistic practices, distancing themselves from Hindu rituals, reviving their language Kudmali, and by publishing newsletters addressing the community. In this paper, I explore this politics of Mahato assertion of an Adivasi identity based on my fieldwork in the Jungle Mahals of West Bengal. I argue that this shift from asserting a higher ritual caste to identifying as Adivasis has much to do with the manner in which processes of state-making have unfolded in the region's politics. On an all India level, this politics of seeking to become Adivasi through appeals to the state can be compared with groups like Gujars and Gaddis in north India.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the rewriting of Koch Rajbanshi people's history and identity as a part of larger political project. The paper argues that writing of history from the margins is an act of expressing modern self and also a process of emancipation that questions and dissents the centres of power.

Paper long abstract:

The conscious effort to rewrite history from the margins inherently involves the challenging and resisting of a dominant historiography. However the emergence of this history could be treated as expressing of modern self. Thus, the writing of history has been increasingly associated with and central to debates on identity formation and politics. Today, the Koch-Rajbanshis are rewriting a history that existed but was silenced and excluded from the histories.

The rewriting of history also presents the 'marginalized' with the 'key moment' to indelibly re-inscribe oneself in the past. To rewrite history thus is not to bring a mere variation in the master narrative or dominant historiography nor an innocuous reflection of multiple narratives or histories but draws ones attention to the re-appropriation of history and of competing claims. This perhaps provides the fertile ground for the development of non-metropolitan histories and subaltern pasts. Here we reconfirm that the writing of history from the margins appears contentious and as the new sites of struggle.

We argue in this paper, that the rewriting of histories becomes a part of larger social movements and contextualized within the contemporary socio-political setup. In late nineteenth century, the Rajbanshis had aspired to be a part of Brahminical social order. After hundred years the same group of people preferred to bring out their tribal past and re-indentified differently and couched the movement in the secular language of socio-economic injustices and socio-cultural differences. The ruptures and discontinuity in their history makes them as vulnerable as their identity.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper an attempt has been made to study the social, economic and political consequences of the famine of 1959 and how it has been remembered differently orally and also represented in fictional narratives.

Paper long abstract:

North-east India has extensive bamboo vegetation covering an area of 3.05 million ha. Out of this the state of Mizoram accounts for highest forest cover with bamboo. It has 9 general and 20 species. The reproductive cycle of bamboo vary from species to species. Most of the various kinds of bamboo flower and die only once in about 50 years. There are two distinct groups: ' The mautam group' and 'the ting-tam group.' The former flowers and sprouts its seeds in a cycle of every 50 years and the later every 30 years. Once bamboos start flowering the rats population rises alarmingly and starts attacking the crops and then granaries leading thereby to famine conditions. The famines of 1862, 1882, 1911-12, 1931, 1959,1979 and 2007 have been recorded by missionaries, colonial and post-colonial officials. Sajal Nag who spcialises in the history of modern North-east India is the first to do serious academic work on these famines. But he has based his work on archival sources. Neither did he unearth the oral memories of the people nor the cultural representations of the famines. I have been trying to attempt this gap in my larger project on the social history of the food in Mizoram. This paper is an humble attempt to study the social, economic and political consequences of the famine of 1959 and how it has been remembered differently orally and also represented in fictional narratives.

Paper short abstract:

The Jhumur songs of the adivasi communities of eastern India exhibit a historicity , redefining santal identities through different moments and can be perceived as an ‘alternative archive’. The present effort traces the history of nature state and people through the adivasi songs composed in a given time.

Paper long abstract:

The present work traces the intricate connections between nature, state and property rights through an analysis of the Santali jhumur songs of the adivasis of eastern India,i.e. Bengal, Bihar , Jharkhand. These songs have been orally composed over a period of a century and a half, roughly beginning from the 19th century to the present day. The work tries to recontextualise adivasi identities from alternative archives as reflected in their folk music. . The idea is structured from ethnomusicology, but contrary to an anthropological study of a cultural text, the present work emphasizes on the temporal factor in spatial adivasi identities. The social and political realities like gender discrimination, poverty, displacement, private property and exploitation during the British colonial rule, flow with time through the adivasi songs. The songs memorialize personalities, moments of action as well as dissent. One can get the social ecology of mountains from the loud echo of the musical notes and the gradual transformation in the notes can also be traced in the changing patterns of the urban folk. Thus globalization and homogenization are forcing the songs to follow the present day system of global discourse and restructuring impulse and adivasi songs have become a commodity with proper packaging. This was not so before. In short, the adivasi songs are historical memories, which are more archival to reinvent their society or which can be situated in oppositional contexts in comparison to what we call 'the official state archive.'

Paper short abstract:

Commemoration becomes a pretext for certain revisions of history and its inherent quality in affecting the participant makes it a celebration of the cultural coordinates of a community. In Hul commemoration, we see how adivasi history is enforced into the minds of the consenting subjects.

Paper long abstract:

The memory-content of Santali Insurrection is imprinted with narratives of sufferance and violence. These narratives have their own representational qualities which render them believable and affable. What is left as residue in/through the practice is what renders them significant. The residue is the quality of pleasure that affects the participant associated with the commemorative practice's. In my paper, I would take the question of pleasure vis-à-vis sufferance and violence that are ubiquitous in the narratives of the insurrection and how they feature in the practice of recollection that makes them so significant. We will see how forms of pleasure are cultivated through the performatives of commemoration and are subverted (being compensated) with an enforced sense/responsibility of pain by the machineries (State and/or otherwise) governing the concerned commemorative practice. This dialectics between celebration and sufferance which is symptomatic of all the institutions of martyrdom allow a fertile ground of the appropriation of the celebration into pedadogic practices. Based on my field work conducted in parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal, I would show how the commemoration emerges through appropriation of various forms of histories and cultures, displacements of power and history to establish various relations of power and reverse certain claims of history.