Decolonizing Adivasi Studies

How do we make sense of the complexity of Adivasi histories and their engagement with modernity? As historians who have engaged with activists, we have brought in the much-needed perspective of environmental history, ethnohistory, and activism to this volume. It has allowed us to detail the history of the communities, many of them self-identifying as Adivasi, in terms of their narratives of history and resistance (see the articles by Ruby Hembrom and Gladson Dungdung et al. in this volume). Adivasi experiences are varied: scattered across India in geographically differentiated terrains, pursuing different occupations, and speaking different languages, they inhabit multiple worlds. Therefore, it is critical, we argue, to include Adivasis’ own perceptions of the self and the many meanings that they attach to the attributed unity of ‘Adivasihood’. It is important to note here that much of the research on the Adivasi in the colonial and the post-colonial period has been dominated by non-Adivasi scholars. This is not a problem in itself. The problem occurs when the research is less about listening and more about an extractive methodology that is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism, a powerful remembered history.Footnote ⁶ In the context of eastern India, the late activist and poet Abhay Xaxa wrote poignantly about the post-colonial project of both the state and elite researchers in a similar fashion.Footnote ⁷

How do we get away from an extractive model of understanding Adivasi worlds? The Adivasi writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar has challenged the stereotyping of Adivasis and the search for an authentic, homogeneous community in his book of short stories, The Adivasi Will Not Dance, which came in for some controversy for its portrayal of a Santal woman migrant.Footnote ⁸ These narratives herald a new beginning for Adivasi Studies foregrounding Adivasi voices and signal a much deeper engagement with locality, place, and culture. Anthropologists have long been reflecting on their discipline by decentring the lone fieldworker model and allowing for the inclusion of field research methods such as reflexivity and positionality, and the intermingling of ethnography and memoir. However, as one anthropologist puts it, egocentrism is one of the pitfalls to avoid in exercising reflexivity.Footnote ⁹ For Adivasi Studies, reflexivity is often an empty promise.

There is no denying that there have been powerful evocations of Adivasi narratives in recent times by non-Adivasi writers and activists. These include the activist writings of the late Mahasweta Devi and Father Stan Lourduswamy who worked among the tribals of central India for over three decades and questioned the non-implementation of the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, which stipulates the setting up of a Tribes Advisory Council, composed of members solely from the Adivasi community, for their protection and well-being.Footnote ¹⁰ In the journal Bortika, Mahasweta Devi provided space for small peasants, agricultural labourers, tribals, and workers in factories to write about their problems for the first time.Footnote ¹¹ In the 1982 issue of Bortika relating to the Lodha-Kherias, the story of Chuni Kotal was published. She was later to commit suicide when she became a butt of ridicule while doing her MA at Vidyasagar University.Footnote ¹² Mahasweta Devi's detailing of the exploitative working conditions of the lives of tribal women working in the brick kilns, including rape and molestation, based on a survey of a number of brick kilns in the state, was carefully documented in a special issue of Bortika.Footnote ¹³ In the context of Operation Green Hunt,Footnote ¹⁴ there has also been a genre of literature produced not just by those within academia, but by activists, journalists, and other members of civil society who wrote largely investigative, often evocative, accounts of their experiences in the ‘Red Corridor’, jolting many from the middle class out of their complacency. While such writings focused on the Maoists, these stories brought to the fore narratives about vulnerable Adivasi communities, residing in the deep forests of Bastar, caught in the conflict between the state and the rebel guerrillas, awaiting displacement and destruction because others coveted the mineral-rich lands on which they lived.Footnote ¹⁵

Notwithstanding these powerful advocates in an institutional setting, non-Adivasi researchers have continued to dominate the field of Adivasi Studies because the ‘mechanisms and practices that regulate the points and modes of entry, the nature and extent of participation’Footnote ¹⁶ favour them, while Adivasi researchers are less accommodated. Han has noted that ‘the canonisation of theory serves to help anthropology stagnate in its whiteness, especially through citation politics, by connecting neoliberalism and the perpetuation of coloniality in the discipline’.Footnote ¹⁷ One could make the same case for Adivasi Studies. Furthermore, in line with Han's argument, taking ethics more seriously may be a way to resist the production and reproduction of non-Adivasi academic privilege in Adivasi Studies and create a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy. This will involve telling a range of stories ‘from diverse perspectives and creating an epistemically open environment for marginalized people’Footnote ¹⁸ which all of our contributors to this volume have chosen to do.

Recent published work by Adivasi scholars, activists, and writers is testimony to these emerging spaces in academia, and include Gladson Dungdung's powerful writings (see the article by Gladson Dungdung et al. in this volume) and, more recently, the works of Jiten Yumnam.Footnote ¹⁹ As Ganesh Devy notes:

Jacinta Kerketta's poetry, where she bemoans the fate of Saranda forest crisscrossed with mines and the impact of mining in the region on local communities, is important to reference here. To quote from her writings:

With this recent assertion of Adivasi voices, historians reconstructing and rewriting histories of Adivasi protest have needed to reflect on and engage with the voices of the Adivasis which, in Ivy Hansdak's words, have been ‘shrouded in polite silence for too long’.Footnote ²² Adivasi scholars, as Bhangya Bhukya has pointed out, have begun to increasingly emphasize the importance of an alternative archive—oral narratives—that would help to overcome the deficiency of the colonial archive, and offer important insights into the lived history of Adivasi communities.Footnote ²³ This new turn emphasizes the need to move beyond analysing just ‘the claustrophobic confines’ of Adivasi identity which was imposed on them by ‘the colonial administrator, the colonial anthropologist, the missionary’Footnote ²⁴ and to rethink the production of knowledge about Adivasis by unpacking majoritarian voices which silence the marginal ones.

Most articles in this collection cut across the colonial and post-colonial time frames; move beyond just an engagement with the colonial archive; and bring to the fore Adivasi experiences and modes of negotiation with the everyday. Our contributors—academics writing from diverse disciplinary perspectives and activists working on contentious issues on the ground—bring to this special issue a richness of perspective as they reflect on Adivasi worlds and engage with a variety of issues.

The context

Adivasis, or the approximately 80–100 million people officially declared as Scheduled Tribes under the Indian Constitution,Footnote ²⁵ have been subjected to much scholarly and public debate. The term ‘Adivasi’, translatable as ‘original inhabitants’, came into use for the first time in 1938 in a political context, with the formation of the Adivasi Sabha in Jharkhand.Footnote ²⁶ Although in demographically enumerating the Adivasi population, references are made to available data on Scheduled Tribes,Footnote ²⁷ Adivasi, as a term, is distinct from Scheduled Tribes.Footnote ²⁸ In fact, Adivasis from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha, who went to Assam in the nineteenth century to work on the British tea plantations, are not recognized as Scheduled Tribes in areas governed by the Sixth Schedule.Footnote ²⁹ This brings up the critical question of the choice of the term ‘Adivasi’ over the contending categories of ‘tribe’, ‘Scheduled Tribe’, and ‘Indigenous People’, terms that are often interchangeably used in common parlance, especially when apprehensions about the possibility of Adivasi Studies have been expressed, pointing towards problems in the use of the term ‘Adivasi’ itself. These contending terms, it needs to be pointed out, are products of distinct genealogies and, therefore, for academics and non-academics, the choice of which nomenclature to use is usually a careful and conscious one.

One can also argue that the inability to arrive at a pan-Indian Adivasi self has been responsible for the disaggregated nature of Adivasi politics. At the same time, the literal meaning of Adivasi as ‘original inhabitants’ enables these communities, along with tribal communities in the Northeast, to position themselves, strategically and politically, as indigenous people in the global arena. Today, different social groups define themselves as Adivasi and stake their claim to material and symbolic resources, imparting to the term a legitimacy that is difficult to ignore, but which needs to be reviewed, embroiled as it is in a host of historical and representational contests and controversies.Footnote ³⁰ There is, after all, a specific politics behind bestowing a forced conceptual unity on categories that have their own sets of limitations.

Adivasi historiographies

In academic discourse, particularly from the 1980s, Adivasi, as a term, has been increasingly used, though in varied contexts. David Hardiman, one of the earliest to privilege Adivasi over tribe, argues that the term ‘Adivasi’ relates to a particular historical development: the subjugation to colonial authority during the nineteenth century of a wide variety of communities that had been relatively free from the control of outsiders before colonial rule, and their shared experience of resistance, which incorporated a consciousness of the ‘Adivasi’ against the ‘outsider’.Footnote ³¹ Virginius Xaxa talks about ‘Adivasi consciousness’: the realization of Adivasis that they have no power whatsoever over ‘anything (land, forests, rivers, resources) that lies in the territory that they inhabit’, arguing that it is this ‘aspect of marginalization that is to be taken note of while designating a group as Adivasi’.Footnote ³² Similarly, Vinita Damodaran, Felix Padel, and Samarendra Das link the Adivasi with the idea of indigeneity in the context of the growing poverty and exploitation of these communities in the colonial and post-colonial period, which saw ‘the marginalization and proletarianization of many forest-based communities and the demise of their traditional livelihood gain pace all over the world’.Footnote ³³ Nirmal Kumar Mahato seeks to understand Adivasi in terms of values, identities, and knowledge systems within a unified indigenous world view.Footnote ³⁴ Amita Baviskar locates the importance of the term in the context of a liberalized political economy that has led to new kinds of social exclusion and new forms of collectivization.Footnote ³⁵ Others see the Adivasi as not just situated in the experience of subjugation and difference, but embedded in a politics of representation. Crispin Bates and Alpa Shah underline the necessity for a historically, socially, and politically focused approach to understand the ways in which particular forms of resistance are considered as Adivasi at particular points in time.Footnote ³⁶ Sangeeta Dasgupta and Uday Chandra see the Adivasi today as a modern subject negotiating with modern state power,Footnote ³⁷ displaying, as Tanika Sarkar has pointed out, plural identities that are ‘radically contingent, impermanent, changeable habitations’.Footnote ³⁸ Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta emphasize the need to recognize the politics of ‘becoming Adivasi’ which helps identify the multiplicity of events, sites, and representations through which the concept of the Adivasi is, and has been, constructed and negotiated,Footnote ³⁹ and accommodate what Sarkar refers to as ‘the range of multiple histories around the singular subject of the Adivasi’.Footnote ⁴⁰

It is important to note here that writings on Adivasis and Adivasi issues have a long lineage that can be drawn upon. Although Adivasi as a term emerged much later, writings on tribal communities can be traced from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the times of the East India Company and the British Raj. As travellers, colonial administrators, missionaries, and anthropologists made sense of the landscape and the people they encountered, they described customs and documented culture, in the process constructing difference as well as analysing it.Footnote ⁴¹ An examination of the colonial discourse on tribes over a long period reveals, as Damodaran argues, that the explicitly racist views on the assimilation and civilization of ‘backward peoples’, which had been vehemently expressed in the early and mid-nineteenth century, were giving way to more humanistic considerations that started to be expressed in the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century in the reports of fair-minded officers and missionaries, and through special legislation.Footnote ⁴²

It is important to note here that there were remarkable continuities between colonial and national anthropological endeavours, such as the People of India project by K. S. Singh in 1994 where the similarity with H. H. Risley's project in 1908Footnote ⁴³ was the use of biological data, including cephalic and nasal indexes, reminiscent of racialized colonial categories, to group people.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is interesting to note that the last of the survey organizations to be established, starting with the Survey of India, Geological Survey of India, Botanical Survey of India, and Zoological Survey of India, was the Anthropological Survey of India which was set up in December 1945. Singh emphasizes ‘the intensive lobbying by administrator-anthropologists—including J. P. Mills, J. H. Hutton, W. V. Grigson, W. G. Archer with anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and C. von Furer-Haimendorf—over 15 years to create a special dispensation for the tribes under the Government of India Act of 1935 and through various suggestions and proposals including those for the creation of a Crown Colony in the North East and a protectorate for the tribals’.Footnote ⁴⁵ (See the article by Katja Müller in this volume.)

In the period immediately after Independence, however, tribe, unlike caste, was emerging as a peripheral concern. Tribes were seen as an entity that either hindered the progress of the nation and were therefore to be assimilated within it or, alternatively, as a unique entity that added to the cultural plurality of the nation and therefore had to be preserved and nurtured. Its distance from ideas of modernity and progress had relegated it to the world of the primitive.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was in order to counter this image that Jaipal Singh Munda, leader of the Jharkhand Party, sarcastically stated during the Constituent Assembly debates on the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution: ‘I am very sorry to disappoint … that, in supporting the Fifth Schedule, I did not dress in my bows and arrows, the loin cloth, feathers, earrings, my drum and my flute …’Footnote ⁴⁷ Bishop Dr Nirmal Minz, a public intellectual and activist, expressed a similar sentiment: ‘Garv se kaho hum adivasihain (Say with pride, I am an Adivasi)’.Footnote ⁴⁸ (See the article by Saagar Tewari in this volume.)

Debates on the tribal question continued throughout the 1960s,Footnote ⁴⁹ when the predicament of distinguishing between caste and tribe had begun to haunt anthropologists, who now contested the idea that tribal communities were bounded and isolated. Among those who expressed disquiet were F. G. Bailey, Surajit Sinha, N. K. Bose, S. C. Dube, and Andre Beteille.Footnote ⁵⁰As Bailey wrote, the ‘Tribe-Caste Continuum is a polar ideal type of construction, which implies that no known society precisely corresponds to the description of the extreme ends, but all fall near one end or the other of the poles or in-between’.Footnote ⁵¹ Andre Beteille emphasized the importance of moving away from established ‘text-book definitions of the tribe’.Footnote ⁵²

Others have also questioned the idea of isolation associated with tribal communities. Brian Morris, in his study of the Hill Pandaram, explores the relationship between tribal communities in the Western Ghats and their neighbours in the plains through long networks of trading relationships.Footnote ⁵³ Elsewhere for western India, Sumit Guha shows that the Bhils, like the Kolis, ‘were not isolated remnant populations savagely defending themselves against encroaching civilization’. Rather, they were deeply integrated into the political economy of medieval India.Footnote ⁵⁴ Marine Carrin discusses female priesthood in Bengal on the frontier between tribal and ‘low caste’ society, and thus provides a window into a world of a syncretic popular Hinduism built on social marginality, subaltern assertion, and the politics of gender.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, despite these important interventions, Virginius Xaxa's is a voice of caution when he suggests that tribes need to be studied in their own right and not just with reference to mainstream Hindu society.Footnote ⁵⁶ (See the article by Marine Carrin in this volume.)

By the 1990s, however, these questions were reframed in terms of whether the tribe was a colonial construct, and how far the discipline of anthropology was implicated in this construction.Footnote ⁵⁷ African and Pacific specialists responded to some of these debates within the discipline of anthropology, debunking the colonial stereotype of tribe as misleading and inaccurate in understanding realities. The debate moved forward with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; scholars came to be increasingly perceived as advocating particular political interests.Footnote ⁵⁸ Initial academic discussions on the concept of tribe in India oscillated between two extreme positions. On the one hand were scholars like Susana Devalle,Footnote ⁵⁹ Ajay Skaria,Footnote ⁶⁰ and Sumit Guha,Footnote ⁶¹ who argued that tribe is a ‘colonial category, ahistorical and sociologically groundless’,Footnote ⁶² ‘a product of colonial theories and practices’. The tribe–caste binary, argued Guha, emerged out of late colonial racial ethnology which transformed Indian society's understanding of itself.Footnote ⁶³ The operative categories in pre-colonial Indian society, Guha argued, were not caste and tribe.Footnote ⁶⁴ In contrast, Damodaran argued that colonial epistemology—even as it drew upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European notions of race, colonial environmental ideas, and a humanitarian concern—aligned itself with Brahmanical notions of caste, values, and laws to underpin the category of tribe.Footnote ⁶⁵ Uday Chandra traces a ‘tension between the ‘constitutional ideal of liberal citizenship and the disturbing reality of tribal subjecthood produced by colonial and post-colonial Indian states’.Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘Primitive populations’, he argues, were, paradoxically, subjects of both improvement and protection; the idea of primitivism—with both its continuities and changes—was an ideology of rule from its origins in Victorian India to the post-colonial present.Footnote ⁶⁷ Townsend Middleton, however, argues that the practices of colonial recognition were constantly shifting; its operatives worked in dialogue with anthropological and proto-anthropological thinkers in the European world.Footnote ⁶⁸ (See the article by Sangeeta Dasgupta in this volume.)

Resistance histories

While colonial ethnography, missionary narratives, and anthropological texts were describing communities and defining categories, British administrators on the ground believed that they had to reckon with irrational primitives who thought that bullets would turn into water, bloodthirsty rascals who were forever on the verge of rebellion. Even in the 1960s, when historians sought to restore Adivasis to their rightful place in history, there was a continuity with the premises of earlier nationalist narratives: an Adivasi movement was assessed in terms of its contribution to the nation and its making. Adivasi protest was initially millenarian with dreams of a utopian present; it assumed an agrarian dimension when it was confronted by an interference in their customary rights; it became political only after integration with Congress politics.Footnote ⁶⁹

By the 1980s, historiographies of resistance in post-colonial ethnographic scholarship in universities tried to be critical and reflexive. Ranajit Guha, the founder of the Subaltern Studies project, in his ‘The prose of counter insurgency’, wrote about the ways in which colonial power silenced the historical record of the Santals by representing their popular resistance as pathologies, problems of order, or symptoms of religious fanaticism. An opposition to the triumvirate—the sarkari, sahukari, and zamindari nexus (collusion between the state, moneylender, and landlord)—imparted to Adivasis a collective consciousness against the outsider.Footnote ⁷⁰ The later Subaltern Studies project, however, moved away from this perspective, drawing more heavily on postmodernism Subaltern Studies, with more of a focus on how subalternity was constructed and less on finding subaltern voices.Footnote ⁷¹

In the more recent historiographical turn, the quest for writing Adivasi histories has opened up alternate ways of understanding Adivasi pasts. (See the article by Anandaroop Sen in this volume.) As Tanika Sarkar writes, there is no ‘true, essential core identity’ in the designation of selfhood of the ‘Adivasi rebel’ as subaltern historians had suggested. Rather, what can be demonstrated is ‘the fragility of all naming’ as the ‘rebel’ displayed plural identities.Footnote ⁷² Sangeeta Dasgupta argues for the need to question the representation of Adivasis as homogenous communities, always united in their opposition to non-Adivasis, and recognize the internal conflicts that such representations occlude.Footnote ⁷³ Patterns of migrations of Adivasi communities determined claims to land and ritual privileges; cleavages within Adivasi communities were strengthened and reordered with colonial intervention. (See the article by Philipp Zehmisch in this volume.) Sanjukta Das Gupta questions the supposed communal nature of Adivasi landownership and argues that the village-based social organization of the Hos was partly designed to ensure the control of the founders of the village over village resources.Footnote ⁷⁴

The ecological basis of Adivasi protests has been underlined in some of the resistance literature.Footnote ⁷⁵ A historically nuanced approach, for example, is not about making the case for isolated forest communities in the past. Many of the communities we are concerned with here were actively engaged with trading in an earlier pre-colonial period and there were a succession of immigrant cultures in the sub-continent over the centuries, as has been established by researchers. Studies of Adivasi languages and archaeological and anthropological evidence have yielded important new insights into the nature of historical migration patterns in South and Southeast Asia. All this makes the case for distinctive cultures and identities. More recently, James Scott has persuasively argued, using the term ‘Zomia’, that the hills in South and Southeast Asia were populated increasingly during periods of migration when state subjects fled valley kingdoms due to forced labour, taxes, or wars—an effect of state making and state expansion that resulted in the formation of what he calls ‘new resistant identities reformulated in locations in the hills’.Footnote ⁷⁶ He goes on to argue that the continuity of the ethnic cultures living in frontier regions in East Asia can be seen to provide a counter-narrative to the traditional story about modernity. These are interesting and important arguments. One can similarly argue that the resistance to the growing marginalization of many of these forest-based communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their struggle against the relentless and predatory nature of colonial capital and its post-colonial guises and exploitation of the forest frontier and of land and resources, need to be reconceptualized in the context of a new and emancipatory Adivasi Studies.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the context of rapid social and economic change, one also needs to analyse fragmented identities and new cultural positionings.Footnote ⁷⁸ One can argue in this context that the postmodern attack on the idea of a unified subject has rendered the notion of an emancipatory politics problematic, with the argument that the identity of the Adivasi subject rests on flimsy grounds. In the context of Adivasi resistance, the writings of Dungdung et al. strongly challenge this interpretation. (See the article by Gladson Dungdung et al. in this volume.)

Land, legality, and precarity

The relationship to the state and its legal framework is important here. Adivasi communities have often been involved in contestations in law courts, particularly in relation to land. As Marine Carrin has argued, being a Santal means having a very particular colonial history and a specific position in the intricate relationship between and discourse of statehood and citizenship.Footnote ⁷⁹ Different understandings of land rights, and the use of ‘lawfare’ by private interestsFootnote ⁸⁰ since the colonial period, continue to undermine Adivasi livelihoods. In 1921 William Archer recorded the following narrative in Chotanagpur:

The largely rural and Adivasi communities in India have been most affected by the ways in which laws that impact on their ability to access, use, and own resources have been historically and legally framed. The land struggles in eastern India, for example, have resulted in some unique tenure laws like the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 which was a product of Adivasi movements such as the Birsa Munda rebellion in the late nineteenth century. However, their success here was undermined by the forest laws in the region which were imposed from above by the state and thus more difficult to challenge. The usurpation of common natural resources over land by the state or private interests have had a major impact on people's lives both in the colonial period and now. Many scholars have commented on post-colonial continuities in terms of ecological control and resistance in India. The state ownership of forests and the application of the legal principle of ‘eminent domain’ have ‘continued to erode the customary collective rights of local communities to commons whilst the classification of forests based on the principles of conservation and commercial use … have deprived the rural poor of timber, fodder, firewood, forest lands and produce’.Footnote ⁸² Local norms and practices are flouted and the extensive powers of the Forest Department over the lives and livelihoods of local populations have resulted in the forced displacement of forest-based communities from national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Usurpation has been achieved through a complex network of Forest Acts, laws concerning minor forest produce, common lands, industrial and agrarian laws, and policies that have enabled the post-colonial state to make these lands available to specific private industries, which has had an enduring impact on land and Adivasi labour in factories. (See the article by Christian Strümpell in this volume.)

Understanding of legal entitlements or rights as legally defined bundles, for example in relation to common property, has been vital and resulted in what one writer has described as ‘practices in and beyond legal institutions and how law has emerged as a critical area of struggle between different actors’ in specific contexts in colonial India. This is particularly important given the crisis in the legal system in India today and the way in which law is overlooked in the context of sustained land grabs by mining companies, enshrining the protection of private interests at all costs though ‘lawfare’ or the use of law as a medium of control in predominantly Adivasi areas. By examining legal norms as they emerged in specific contexts, one can examine the ways in which rights to use, own, and access resources have been framed by local communities in dialogue with the state. Subaltern resistance has taken the form of legal and popular struggles. (See the articles by Sohini Sengupta and Dalel Benbabaali in this volume.)

It can be suggested that it is an environmental history perspective that lends credence to the field of Adivasi Studies.Footnote ⁸³ Given the increasing marginalization of Adivasi communities, another useful perspective for us to consider in this context is Judith Butler's conceptualization of precarity, whereby precarity is unevenly distributed thus making some more vulnerable than others. Neoliberalism, environmental crises, or war are key drivers of precarity. Butler also argues that vulnerability is inherently connected to, but may not automatically imply, precarity, that is, vulnerability as a shared and interdependent condition.Footnote ^84, Footnote ⁸⁵ Damodaran has argued elsewhere for the ways in which certain Adivasi groups in eastern India were rendered more precarious and vulnerable to famine (which had long plagued communities of the plains) in the late nineteenth century, resulting in some of the first famine-related deaths in the region.Footnote ⁸⁶

The gender implications for increasing precarity have also been explored by some Adivasi scholars. The violence against Adivasi women needs to be seen in the context of the breakdown of the ecological moral economy. There was a widely held notion among local communities that the economic and environmental changes under colonial rule and the deforestation that had brought about endemic social disorder and disease were the result of the workings of malevolent forces. As Marine Carrin notes, quoting Bodding's work among the Santals in the 1920s, the discourse on the cause of disease and disorder focused on the action of witches, malevolent bongas, and the transgression of taboo.Footnote ⁸⁷ The association of the malevolent bonga with particular women was the immediate reason for the targeting of such possessed women. One can argue that the rise in witch-hunting in the latter half of the nineteenth century was linked to the breakdown of social norms and the increasing pressures on the community because of colonial interventions. These continue to be recorded in the post-colonial period.

The current volume

The contributors to this volume, who include both academics and activists, broadly address the themes sketched above on categories and concepts, the politics of identity formation by both the state and communities, place and place making, memory and migration, which are all critical to contemporary Adivasi experiences and merit serious discussion. It is hoped that by bringing into view specific contexts of Adivasi engagements with modernity, the articles in this volume will fill this lacuna on the multiple worlds of the Adivasi and bring a strong sense of history, ecology, migration, identity, and politics into the discussion.

Sangeeta Dasgupta's article traces nineteenth-century colonial representations of the tribe with special reference to the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. She demonstrates how fluid ways of describing communities and social groups were, by the end of the nineteenth century, erased and descriptive ways of understanding the tribe transformed when the term was defined in an all-India official report—the Census Report of 1901. While tracing a pattern in the shifts within official understanding, she argues that these were related to the working of official minds and changing assumptions; the tensions within the discipline of anthropology and its application in the colony; the shades of meaning within ideologies of governance and the imperatives of rule; the changing role of Adivasi agency; and dialogues and interactions with ‘native’ informants and correspondents along with personal observations of local practices. Categories and imaginaries—both Western and indigenous—were drawn upon, but recast, as colonial knowledge of the peoples of Chhotanagpur came to be constituted. We need, then, to move beyond the colonial past and critically read the foundational texts of colonial ethnography that are used even today by bureaucrats, judges, pleaders, activists, and academics, and by Adivasis themselves.

Katja Müller's article is an analysis of colonial photographs taken by the anthropologist Egon von Eickstedt, who went to British India in the 1920s and 1930s. Müller traces the life history of the German anthropologist and explores the Dresden ethnographic museum's archive of his collection of about 12,000 photographic images of Adivasi communities, which are mounted on index cards and sorted into categories, and about 2,000 objects representing Adivasi culture. She discusses the response of Adivasis to some of the objects and photographs that were part of an exhibition at the Leipzig ethnographic museum and the Museum of Voice of the Adivasi Academy in Tejgadh, Gujarat, in 2012. In the photographs, it is primarily Eickstedt's voice that one can hear, although the Adivasis, in a primarily unequal power structure, did express sentiments; in the archive of the photographs at Dresden, organized according to his cataloguing and description, his voice predominates and the voice of the Adivasi is almost silenced. But when contemporary Adivasis were shown Eickstedt's photographs and the museum installation of objects collected by him at the Leipzig ethnographic museum and voiced their disagreements at how they had been represented, Adivasi voices were reinscribed onto Eickstedt's anthropological project. Their voices were louder still when, in the event organized at Tejgadh, they saw Eickstedt's photographs as images of their ancestors, carried these in a ritual ceremony, and placed them in their homes in close proximity to images of their gods and the photographs of their deceased. The lost voice of the Adivasi in an anthropological project of colonial times is thus strongly expressed in the present. Müller thus highlights what a decolonial perspective can bring to colonial collections.

Taking forward the importance of understanding colonial categories, Marine Carrin argues in her article that the colonial category of ‘tribe', which transmuted relatively easily into the transnational category of ‘indigenous’, is a distinctly Euro-American narrative of progressive liberation defined by international agencies and best avoided. Carrin advocates the importance of a culture-specific notion of indigeneity as constructed by the Santals of Jharkhand in the second half of the nineteenth century which takes into account their own trajectory of political subjectivity and draws upon myths of creation, village stories, and folktales largely drawn from the missionary archive. Santal indigenous knowledge, she argues, becomes a resource for the politics of representation and a strong affirmation of Adivasi identity. Located at the interface of orality and writing, it imparts to the Santals a historical consciousness and a shared identity, intimately relates to the forest, embedded as it is in a contiguity between humans, animals, and plants, and displays a new imagining against dispossession and memory loss. In privileging indigenous knowledge as a departure point, Carrin argues that indigenous people can exercise their agency by producing strategies of resistance not simply in terms of protest but also by forging new ideas.

In Ruby Hembrom's article, the decolonial perspective is further emphasized as she argues for the critical importance of the need to address Adivasis’ own perceptions of the self. As founder, publisher, and director of adivaani (the first voices), an archiving and publishing outfit of and by Adivasis, Hembrom expresses this sentiment when she talks about reclaiming the reproduction of Adivasi knowledge through the lens of an Adivasi. Deliberately translating Adivasi as the ‘indigenous peoples of India’, she writes that Adivasis have always been the objects of writing; these accounts have been the outsiders’ view, not of them and by them. Hembrom writes off the importance of colonial archival records in a single stroke when she states: ‘we were living documents ourselves’. Being an Adivasi herself, Hembrom's article is part auto-ethnographic; it reflects on her own inclusion in the issues, articulations, and struggles of her peoples. The act of writing and Indigenous literature, she argues, are the tools to resist cultural displacement and loss of traditional ways of being, thinking, and expression. Even if displaced, Adivasis are still owners and carriers of their stories and are the ones most appropriate to retell them in non-conventional ways, often in contravention of what writing cultures expect or are accustomed to. Writing and orality, therefore, are practices of both resistance and resurgence.

The point that the experience of tribal communities is embedded in specific contexts is also outlined in Philipp Zehmisch's article on the Andaman Islands, which explores the contested notion of ‘indigeneity’ and Scheduled Tribe status, through an analysis of Andamanese communities, who live on ancestral lands and who are culturally, socially, and economically ‘different’ to other migrant communities. Here, he argues that state authorities and activists reject the Ranchis’ demands for affirmative action as Adivasis from elsewhere but not of the Andamans. The article allows us to explore alternative ways of thinking through the notion of indigeneity and the production of new forms of precarity. By focusing on the subaltern history of labour migration, it fills a lacunae in debates on tribal migration, and the reception and production of new forms of subalternity.

Anandaroop Sen's article deals with the production of subalternity by the Raj in the colonial frontier of northeastern India in 1872 through colonial expeditionary violence, and ideas of chiefdom and community among the Lushais. He argues for a category of governance conceived in the expeditionary violence and reared in colonial law. He persuasively argues that, by committing suicide, the two Lushai leaders Liengpunga and Khalkam who killed themselves in the prison at Hazaribagh were engaged in an act within a field that had produced them as certain kind of persons. He outlines the brutal and punitive measures employed by the colonial state, despite the narrative of protectionism

Saagar Tewari's article is on Adivasi engagements with the state and state making in the 1940s. As he charts out some of the processes by which the Constituent Assembly drew upon colonial ideas of protective provisions for tribal populations and wove them into the fabric of the Indian Constitution, he argues that it was the assertion of Adivasi voices that compelled a change in Congress politics. The final framing of tribal welfare policy through the draft and subsequent incorporation of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules into the Constitution of India, Tewari shows, was influenced by the wider political dynamics and negotiations of the time in which the role of tribal agency was seminal. In this context, he discusses the role of the various communist-led movements in tribal areas, and the Jharkhand agitation by the Adivasi Mahasabha under Jaipal Singh Munda's leadership which gave tribal demands a certain ‘visibility’ in the constitutional dynamics played out between 1947–1950. Under pressure from several sides, the rulers of the independent Indian nation-state undertook to devise a new administrative paradigm for governing tribal areas which differed significantly from the governor-centric one enshrined in the Government of India Act, 1935. Thus, as he points out, even though the colonial discourse on tribal people was appropriated, there was one crucial distinction: representational democracy through elections was now given pride of place.

Sohini Sengupta's article focuses on the precarious lives of Binjhal communities of central India in recent times, drawing on the theme of the remembered landscape and on the classic work of Pierre Nora, Realm of memory Footnote ⁸⁸ to analyse states of abjection and memories of sovereignty among Adivasi people. It also explores plural sources of evidence, including civil suit notices and deeds of ancestors, in Adivasi accounts. Focusing on landscape and memory as the basis for claims making, the article makes a powerful intervention in the literature on land rights by revealing the complexity of land tenures, legal rights, legal pluralism, and the production of precarity over the longue duree.

The theme of resistance in the context of the post-colonial state is the subject of the article led by Gladson Dungdung and co-authored with Felix Padel and Vinita Damodaran, where trauma, testimony, and witnessing in the context of the violence of the post-colonial state is explored through a detailed and granular analysis of movements of resistance: the jungle katai andolan, the Niyamgiri Surakhya Samiti, and the Pathalgadi movement. Adivasi agency, witnessing, and first-person narrative by Dungdung, who is an Adivasi activist, dominate the analysis of this article which seeks to foreground his powerful testimony against the expropriation of Adivasi land and resources in the face of extraordinary state violence. The article offers a powerful decolonial and contemporary perspective on resistance.

Dalel Benbabaali's article shifts the focus on resistance to South India where she outlines another resistance movement and the way in which Adivasis seek autonomy as a response to their dispossession and to the accumulation of capital that is taking place, at their expense, in a resource-rich tribal territory. Based on a case study of the Bhadrachalam in the Scheduled Area of Telangana, the factors leading to land alienation are analysed to uncover a story of agricultural colonization and industrialization. She carefully outlines the processes of marginalization through rapid accumulation by dominant castes through exploitation of both nature and labour. Adivasis’ resistance here is a way to reclaim control over their own resources and to preserve their distinct identity.

Finally, Christian Strümpell's article outlines the Adivasi encounter with a radically different modernity in the Rourkela steel plant racked with ethnic conflict. Upper caste managers routinely described Adivasis as jangli (‘savage’), lacking education, and as hard drinkers, thus enabling them to place these workers in especially hazardous working conditions in the plant's coke ovens and blast furnaces. Although this has changed in the 1990s, he shows how Adivasi workers’ struggle to prove their rightful place in the educated company workforce continues to be an uphill task. Here the working class experiences of migrant Adivasis are explored in the context of an industrialized township.

The richness of these articles, we hope, will generate new scholarship in Adivasi Studies. As a relatively young field that needs to create for itself a space and affirm itself as an intellectually productive one in the years to come, Adivasi Studies needs to delineate its markers, methods, and agenda; and its possibilities for dialogue with other fields like Dalit Studies and environmental history. Today, it is necessary to move beyond just discussions of terminology since academics engaging with it endorse the term ‘Adivasi’ as one that is politically meaningful in that it powerfully expresses not just dispossession and marginalization, but also hope and resilience. At the same time, we have argued for the contours of a new Adivasi Studies and an ethics of engagement that will ensure that the field is not only externally defined in a top-down manner, but also by Adivasi scholars and activists, whose contributions have hitherto not been recognized, setting fresh agendas. This should lead to a more inclusive and equitable academy.