The Adivasi In The City: my review of Gauri Bharat’s book, “In Forest, Field And Factory: Adivasi Habitations Through Twentieth-Century India” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Special issue: Multiple worlds of the Adivasi. An introduction
Modern Asian Studies
On 6 December 1959, the image of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating the Damodar Valley Corporation dam project in Bihar with a 15-year-old Adivasi girl called Budhini Manjhiyan was flashed across the national newspapers. This was an iconic moment in the national debate around development and change which was to dominate modern India on whether lands, predominately rural and tribal, were to be flooded to benefit the nation. Years later, in 2016, when the newspapers caught up with Budhini, she had returned to Jharkhand and was struggling to make ends meet for herself and her children. Her story resonates with the ways in which, in recent times, Adivasis are becoming increasingly visible as subjects in debates around indigeneity, identity, conversion, development, and climate change. The post-colonial Indian state and its allies, with a developmentalist agenda uppermost in their minds, have made loss of land, displacement, migration, and forced resettlement a part of A...
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies - February 2021
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies, 2021
This is indeed a matter of great pleasure to be invited by an eminent scholar like Professor Asoka Kumar Sen to engage in an academic pursuit so close to my heart. Guest editing this issue of the promising and upcoming Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies has been yet another enriching experience. Even though, I had prior experience of editing essays for India's Scheduled Areas: Untangling governance, law and politics, as co-editor with Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, I realized that the editorial responsibilities can be drastically different on occasions. Nevertheless, I am very happy to have agreed to this proposal and after several ups and downs we are in a position to present three essays and a book review. The essays by Namrata Chaturvedi, Santosh Kumar Kiro and Innocent Soren deal with three different aspects of the Adivasi people and their society while Suchibrata Sen contributes a book review. Namrata Chaturvedi offers a new methodological input so far as study of indigenous societies is concerned. She offers a comparative approach to study what she calls as 'solidarities and intersectionalities in Native American and Indian Adivasi women's poetry'. The method of analysis followed in the essay is so powerful that the reader will immediately realise the utility of the study. As global solidarities between indigenous groups are considered to be crucial in their resistance to marginalization this essay offers clue to formulate a solidarity which is located in the shared world views and values. Solidarity between indigenous groups is attempted to be achieved at a more emotional level by identifying the similar patterns through an exploration of Native American and Indian women poetries focusing on recurring themes of subjugation and marginalization on the one hand, and nature-human relationship and socio-cultural milieu on the other. Similarly, Santosh Kumar Kiro offers a sociological reading of folklores of Austro-Asiatic tribes of central India. Kiro also raises alarm over the depleting sources of Munda history which was once preserved in the rich repertoire of folklores. With oral narratives gaining increased recognition as source of reliable history it becomes important to preserve oral resources, primarily the folklores of the community. Kiro has analysed several folklores in his essay to bring home the point that Munda people enjoy harmonious relationship with nature and the wilderness due to a belief system weaved around their folk culture emerging from their life experiences and constructs an imaginary symbiosis between human and nature. The essay by Innocent Soren deals with the menace of liquor sale in Adivasi areas and the engagement of Adivasi people with this. Soren has adopted an approach which neither starts with creating a taboo around drinking nor succumbs to a rationalist and statist perspective. He approaches the issue from an indigenous perspective by not only acknowledging the continued significance of home-brewed v liquor for the Adivasi people but also providing an analysis of the issue avoiding the hollowness of the exercise as evident in researches where visible distance is created between the researcher and their subject. Soren offers a solution of regulating liquor production and consumption as well as sale through the gram sabhas (village assemblies). In suggesting this, Soren reiterates what is already present in the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996. Finally, we have a book review by Suchibrata Sen, an eminent scholar and historian, who argue that 'History writing is not only about looking at the past. The future crisis of climate change, which at present is also showing its dangerous face, may find its genesis from this book and herein lies the novelty of the book. One can hear 'both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor' from the book by Nirmal Kumar Mahato (2020) Sorrow Songs Woods: Adivasi-Nature Relationship in the Anthropocene in Manbhum. I am quite confident that the essays will contribute to the existing knowledge base of studies on Adivasis and will help scholars to know and explore more about the community.
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies - August 2016
Not considered as a major tribe, the Paharias of Santal Parganas in Jharkhand have generally been a victim of scholarly neglect. The essay therefore attempts to present an overview of their socio-political organisation , as it developed up to the early British period. The essay also serves the collateral purpose of the transformation of a pre-state polity into a state system. Divided into three broad sections, the first section unfolds the specific ecological setting that had considerable influence on the Paharia socio-political organisation and the policies of the imperial forces. The second section covers roughly a history of more than two hundred years when the Mughals and British intervened and considerably changed Paharia socio-polity. The last section seeks to study how this intervention led to the formation of a hybrid socio-political organisation that considerably broke the isolation of the Paharias and joined them with the colonial political economy.
Journal of international women's studies, 2020
The forests of Attappady Hills part of the Western Ghats in Kerala homeland to Adivasi people is a frontier region where a settler population is now predominant. This paper aims to bring the concept of borders as a heuristic device to interpret gender-ecology-indigeneity in Attappady. The conversations among Adivasis, between Adivasis and settlers, between Adivasi women and their children become in media res dialogues of their border subjectivity. This was an empirical study in Attappady in which life experiences, oral history and myths were studied using narrative analysis. The paper discusses four findings: First how land dispossession disproportionately impacted Adivasi women. Second the gradual increase of elopement and its linkage with land dispossession among women and loss of commons. Thirdly the collapse of the household due to alcoholism and Adivasi women’s social movement to protect their oikeon. Fourthly the rupture of gender agriculture foodways and how women are running...
Term Paper, 2021
“Industrialism is, I am afraid, going to be a curse for mankind”, M. K. Gandhi writes in an issue of Young India. In India, industrialisation has indeed been a curse for the marginalised Adivasi communities such as Santhals as the lands they inhabit are usually rich in various natural resources much coveted by industrial corporations. Their attempts to acquire these resources by any means possible leave Adivasi communities destitute, and often, forcefully evicted from their ancestral lands. This essay attempts to illustrate, through examining Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s short story collection The Adivasi Will Not Dance, how such unscrupulous measures not only displace the Santhal community from their land and livelihood, but also dispossess them from their cultures.
From the basti to the 'house': Socio-spatial readings of housing policy in India
In June, 2015, the Government of India approved a national housing programme called the Prime Minster’s Awas Yojana (PMAY; Prime Minister’s Housing Plan), the latest in a series of ‘urban missions’ that have seen the urban emerge as an object for policy intervention in a country long rurally imagined. The emergence of these missions has necessitated the construction of a new urban grammar. Concepts, categories, and classifications have sought to define, delineate, and measure different aspects of the urban landscape so that different modes of practice and intervention may emerge. This article reads this grammar. It does so not to assess policy through its design, efficacy or feasibility, but to argue that policies, at least in part, attempt to create their own objects. A policy is thus both a product and an agent of contemporary politics, simultaneously instrumental and generative, acting a means to an end but also an end unto itself. It is, in many ways, as much a site of the construction of meaning as it is the allocation of resources. This article looks at housing policy in the Indian city from a particular site: auto-constructed neighborhoods in the Indian city – referred to here as the basti in contra-distinction to the ‘slum’. In doing so, it offers a socio-spatial reading of these settlements along three lines: transversality, transparency and opacity. It then reads the proposed new national housing policy against these spatialities and argues that the policy fundamentally misrecongnises ‘housing’ in the Indian city.