Recent articulations of Adivasi Studies as a distinct field of enquiry

 

Excerpts copy pasted for my personal reading from a review article titled Multiple worlds of the Adivasi written by Prof Vinita Damodaran and Prof Sangeeta Dasgupta

Recent articulations of Adivasi  Studies as a distinct field of enquiry

Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta, while emphasizing that the political, cultural, and intellectual terrains of Adivasi subjectivity are continually in flux, seek to conceptually define the field of Adivasi Studies (see Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta, ‘Indigenous pasts and the politics of belonging’, in Rycroft and Dasgupta (eds), The Politics of Belonging in India, pp. 1–13).

Prathama Banerjee analyses the advantages of carving out a semi-autonomous domain of enquiry in the name of the Adivasi and explores whether the field of Adivasi Studies should be seen as the field of operation of a special subject, namely, the Adivasi, the tribe, the indigene, or as a field constituted by a set of distinctive issues and concerns, such as land, forest, myth, and language (see Prathama Banerjee, ‘Writing the Adivasi: some historiographical notes’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 53, no. 1, January–March 2016, pp. 131–153).

Sangeeta Dasgupta discusses some of the imperatives that make revisiting the field of Adivasi Studies compelling and sets out the markers of the field of Adivasi Studies from a historian’s perspective (see Sangeeta Dasgupta, ‘Adivasi Studies: from a historian’s perspective’, History Compass, 16, no. 10, 2018, pp. 1–11; (https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12486).

Bhangya Bhukya suggests that Adivasi Studies should be understood as a federation of studies (Gond Studies, Khasi Studies, Lambada Studies, Munda Studies, etc.) based on the philosophical foundation of indigeneity, advocating that the location of authors is important in indigenous studies. From this standpoint, he refers to the Adivasi Studies initiative, launched in 2015 by the Tribal Intellectual Collective of India and constituted by young indigenous scholars and academicians from across India and the globe (see Bhangya Bhukya, ‘Featuring Adivasi/Indigenous Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly, 56, no. 25, June 19, 2021, p. 17).

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.8 These narratives herald a new beginning for Adivasi Studies foregrounding Adivasi voices and signal a much deeper engagement with locality, place, and culture.

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 (Aranyer Adhikar (Rights over the Forest) 1977) and Father Stan Lourduswamy (Struggle for Swaraj) 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.

It is only during the last twenty years that various tribal voices and works have started making their presence felt. Thus, Kochereti from Kerala and Alma Kabutri from the North surprised readers at almost the same time as L. Khiangte’s anthology of Mizo literature, Desmond Kharmaplang’s anthology of Khasi literature, and Govind Chatak’s anthology of Garhwali literature appeared in English and Hindi translation, respectively.

Ganesh G. Devy, ‘Indigenous languages’, available at: https://www.india-seminar.com/2009/ 601/601_ganesh_n_devy.htm,

Adivasi:

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’.

David Hardiman(first to privilege the term Adivasi over tribe)

Virginius Xaxa speaks of the ‘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’

 

Nirmal Kumar Mahato seeks to understand Adivasi in terms of values, identities, and knowledge systems within a unified indigenous world view.

 

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. (‘Red in tooth and claw?’, in Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics)

 

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. (Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India)

Tanika Sarkar has pointed out, plural identities that are ‘radically contingent, impermanent, changeable habitations’. (‘Rebellion as modern self-fashioning: a Santal movement in colonial Bengal’)

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  accommodate what Sarkar refers to as ‘the range of multiple histories around the singular subject of the Adivasi’ (‘Indigenous pasts and the politics of belonging’)

F. G. 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’ (“Tribe” and “caste” in India)

Andre Beteille emphasized the importance of moving away from established ‘text-book definitions of the tribe’(Tribe and peasantry)

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 in her work  Children of the Goddess: Devotion and Female Priesthood in Bengal.

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. (Transformation of tribes in India: terms of discourse. epw)

Adivasi vs Scheduled Tribe:

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. Although in demographically enumerating the Adivasi population, references are made to available data on Scheduled Tribes. Adivasi, as a term, is distinct from Scheduled Tribes.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.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.

whether the tribe was a colonial construct, and how far the discipline of anthropology was implicated in this construction?

1.     Susan B.C. Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand, Sage Publications, NewDelhi, 1992;

2.     Binoy Bhushan Chaudhuri, ‘The myth of the tribe? The question reconsidered’, The Calcutta Historical Journal, 16, no. 1, 1994, pp. 125–156;

3.     Crispin Bates, ‘Race, caste and tribe: The early origins of anthropometry’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, no. 3, 1995, pp. 1–34;

4.     Felix Padel, The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1995;

5.     Nandini Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–1996, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1997;

6.     Ajay Skaria, ‘Shades of wildness: tribe, caste and gender in western India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 56, no. 3, August 1997, pp. 726–745;

7.     Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1999;

8.     Guha, Environment and Ethnicity; Damodaran, ‘Colonial constructions of the “tribe” in India’;

9.     Willem van Schendel, ‘The dangers of belonging: tribes, indigenous peoples and homelands in South Asia’, in Rycroft and Dasgupta (eds), The Politics of Belonging in India, pp. 19–43;

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.’ (‘Liberalism and its other 135-68)

Initial academic discussions on the concept of tribe in India oscillated between two extreme positions. On the one hand were scholars like Susana Devalle, Ajay Skaria, and Sumit Guha, who argued that tribe is a ‘colonial category, ahistorical and sociologically groundless’, ‘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. The operative categories in precolonial Indian society, Guha argued, were not caste and tribe. 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. 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. ‘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. Townsend Middleton, however, argues that the practices of colonial recognition were constantly shifting; its operatives worked in dialogue with anthropological and protoanthropological thinkers in the European world.

 

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. (Nandini Sundar (ed.), Legal Grounds) Different understandings of land rights, and the use of ‘lawfare’ by private interests since the colonial period, continue to undermine Adivasi livelihoods.

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. (Judith Butler’s focus ‘has been primarily on global inequalities—some racist, some capitalist, some nationalist—that have historically maximised the precariousness of some populations and minimised that of others’. It is this unequal allocation of precarity that, for Butler, forms the point of departure ‘for progressive or left politics in ways that continue to exceed and traverse the categories of identity’)

Disclaimer: This article is in the making.

References:

Damodaran, Vinita and Sangeeta Dasgupta. 2022. ‘Special issue: Multiple worlds of the Adivasi. An introduction’. Modern Asian Studies 56 (5), pp. 1353–1374. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X22000361