Indigenous cultures and the ecology of protest: moral economy and “knowing subalternity” in Dalit and Tribal writing from India (original) (raw)

"Everything's on Fire!": An Ecocritical Reading of Mahasweta Devi's

2022

Although there have been articulate studies around Dalits, covering a range of subjects like Dalit histories, anti-caste intellectuals, untouchability, humiliation, human rights, dignity, reservation, gender, food, land, water, and occupation there is still a lacuna in our understanding of weaving these issues together to explore the interrelations between Dalits and environmentalists. It is crucial to note that Dalit critique of present environmentalism, including their perspective on labor, natural resources, village communities, public spaces, animals, vegetarianism, and sustainable development has not been integrated into environmental studies and politics. The aim of this paper is to excavate these narratives and re-situate them within the framework of political ecology, environmental humanities, and ecofeminism. This examination will be bifold and Munjal 1 critically examine the ties between ecological rights and caste consciousness, as well as reassess the autonomy of women or lack thereof through ecofeminist lenses. The paper will employ textual analysis as a methodological apparatus to deconstruct and reconstruct the question of person-environment transactions in Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi.

Mukul Sharma, 'My World Is a Different World': Caste and Dalit Eco-Literary Traditions

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2019

India 'nature writing' has traditionally encompassed ecology, geography and sacrality, and has often missed Dalit literary traditions. In the last few decades, environment literature has expanded its horizons to consider intersections between ecology, society and culture. However, the question still remains: why is there no recognition of ecological underpinnings in the writings of subordinate castes by the wider canon of the environmental literary sphere? This article addresses this exclusion and explores the relationship between caste, nature, Dalits and environmental imagination. It takes Dalit autobiographies from different regions and languages to highlight an unexplored aspect of Dalit writings, thus widening the scope and perspective of environment literature and providing a distinct perspective from the margins. Through the lens of eco-literature, eco-criticism and eco-justice, the article underlines how nature's beauty and caste burden, space and identity, land and bondage, social injustice and environmental 'othering' are significant features of these life narratives. It weaves certain select themes like nature's beauty, caste exploitation, labour and animals to explore the pain and stigmatisation, along with a vibrancy and dynamism, in Dalit eco-narrations of the self.

Going Primitive: The Ethics of Indigenous Rights Activism in Contemporary Jharkhand

SAMAJ, 2013

How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal, and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their political discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for these activists? To answer these interrelated questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand, formerly south Bihar. In these self-narratives, I focus on the ways in which these middle-class activists have crafted their political ethics with reference to “indigenous communities” in India and beyond. I argue that “indigeneity” functions in Jharkhandi activist discourses as a marker of a distinctive post-materialist turn in bourgeois politics. The defense of the indigenous or primitive speaks to deep-seated existential crises among bourgeois activists, who seek to simultaneously transcend the modern domains of state and capital as well as locate an authentic space of political ethics and critique in imagined adivasi collectivities. By acting as patrons of “primitive” peoples who purportedly avoid lying, the state, and the money economy, indigeneity activists assume vanguardist roles in ways that satisfy, firstly, the bourgeois critique of electoral democracy in post-Mandal India and, secondly, the post-Naxalbari desire for an independent left outside the existing communist party alternatives. These twin sources of the Jharkhandi activist’s self may be often complementary, but, at the same time, there are very real tensions between them. As the three activist tales in this paper demonstrate, independent left activists, for example, often takes bourgeois politics in contemporary India as their ideological point of departure; the bourgeois celebration of the individual is, similarly, at odds with the leftist quest for post-capitalist collectivities. Nonetheless, these tensions come to the fore most clearly when we consider the limited popular support enjoyed by these activists, especially when ordinary adivasi men and women refuse to assume what Michel Rolph-Trouillot (2003) famously called the “savage slot.” This kind of rejection, in fact, further fuels the existential crises that propel indigeneity activism in Jharkhand today insofar as it prompts the unending bourgeois search for a “purer,” more ethical self that claims to be the antithesis of politics yet aspires to a total politics that suffuses every individual belief, act, and idiosyncrasy. This paper thus sheds light on the politics of the anti-political and the modernity of anti-modernism in contemporary India. """

Marginalization of Sundarbans' Marichjhapi: Ecocriticism Approaches in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Deep Halder's Blood Island

Literature, 2022

The article identifies the Sundarbans landscape as a ‘marginal scape’ in the context of the Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979. It applies the conservationist vs. environmental (in)justice approach of ecocriticism to Amitava Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Deep Halder’s Blood Island: An Oral History of Marichjhapi Massacre. It relates the idea of environmental discrimination and injustice based on caste to the misallocation of the ‘Commons’. For the Marichjhapi Dalit Refugees, the Sundarbans landscape and its ecological attributes become an essential medium in reconstructing their layered identity after migrating from Bangladesh to Sundarbans, which becomes marginalized. The paper argues that the management of environmental resources/landscapes has always been in the hands of the rich, entwined with Brahminical hegemony, who try to impose political geography over ecological systems to suppress the dispossessed. It concludes by comprehending that any justice-based approach (here, social and environmental) still favours non-human beings and ends up causing a multi-layered crisis for marginalized human populations.

Primitive Accumulation and "Primitive" Subjects in Postcolonial India: Tracing the Myriad Real and Virtual Lives of Mediatized Indigeneity Activism

In late 2008, a five-minute video clip titled " Gaon Chodab Nahin" (literally, "We Shall Not Leave our Village") came into circulation among activists and grassroots NGOs in the forest highlands of eastern India. To those who watched and passed on the video throughout the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa, it summed up the plight of adivasi or "tribal" populations in the region as they battled an emerging state-corporate nexus whose plans for rapid industrialization in India relied on greater access to forest and mineral resources. This paper critically interrogates the myriad lives of this video clip through a close study of the real and virtual arenas in which it came to be viewed and engaged by different audiences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the forest state of Jharkhand in eastern India, I examine how developmental NGOs, indigeneity activists, and rural adivasi villagers came to view and interpret this video differently. These different interpretations, I show, simultaneously perpetuate and destabilize established ideas of " primitivism " in postcolonial India, especially when some adivasi subjects talk back to their well-meaning patrons and critique representations of themselves. Might the production of " primitive " subjects be, I ask, paradoxically conjoined to processes of primitive accumulation in postcolonial India?

Tribal Plight and Subaltern Resistance in Selected Writings of Mahasweta Devi

Journal Article, 2020

Power, resistance, and justice are always embedded in a tangled relationship in societal structure. This relationship is carried out by different groups of organizations, or peoples' movements. This paper would study this convoluted connection in tribal domain presented through Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi and Chotti Munda and His Arrow translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Her narrative shows how the "criminalization of power" forces the indigenous people with no other option than 'violent protests' to regain their basic rights. She prefers to call the characters of her stories 'tribal' as they fit to the Indian context. Protagonists namely Chotti Munda in Chotti Munda and His Arrow and Dopti Mejhen in Draupadi are figures of 'continuing struggle'. They are the symbols of "tribal aspiration". She focuses on how in the name of 'land and labour' these tribal people are being displaced from their basic rights like food, shelter, etc. Sometimes they are tagged Maoists or otherwise Naxalites. The power-play of the state machinery pushes them to the periphery. It converts them into 'other', makes them 'marginalized'. This process of 'othering' the tribal (in the Indian context) or Indigenous/Aboriginal people (in the global context) brings forth the haunting question i.e. where do these people stand on the mainstream map? How justifiable is their way of struggle in civil society? This paper will investigate these questions and try to locate their existence in post-civil society.

'Live Simply that all may Simply live': Rethinking the Environmental Paradigms through Select Dalit Autobiographies

The environmental movement in India was born out of the marriage between the concern for the poor, and the protection of natural resources. The movement has largely focused on the inequity suffered by the women and the tribals, overlooking the vicious web of caste prejudices embedded in the current environmental politics. Using two dalit texts, the study pits the discrimination suffered by the lower caste (in terms of the access to environmental resources) against the partial and exclusivist (Brahminical) approach prevalent in the Indian environmental movement and in the process highlights the caste-based alienation that the dalits face at the hands of upper caste fabricated nature. While the environmental movement seeking a return to the traditional hierarchical mode of living is highly critiqued in this study, the portrayal of dalit life lived in close proximity with Nature is significantly focused upon. The study investigates the relationship that the dalits inhabit with Nature using Baby Kamble's The Prisons We Broke, and Aravind Malagatti's Government Brahmana. The environmentalist strain in the workings and activities of the dalit leaders like Periyar, Phule, and Ambedkar serves as an important point of reference for the study. It also acts as a critique of the upper caste hegemonic dominance in the use of the natural resources and, ironically, even in the movement which is meant for the protection of those resources. Man and Nature have historically been priceless to each other and this relationship incorporates a dilemma. As Bate opines, '[T]he definition begins with 'Nature' as the immediate cause of the entire material world, of all phenomena including humankind, but it ends with an opposition between 'Nature' and humans or human creations or civilizations'. We are both a part of and apart from Nature' (Bate 2000: 33). The study delineates the relationship that the characters in the autobiographies inhabit with Nature; their alienation is viewed to be based on the non-human Nature. The caste based politics renders them

Evolving Texture of Environmentalism and Submergence of Justice: A critical note on the Narmada Valley protest in India

Interface : a journal for and about social movements, 2016

Environmental movements, over a period of time, have articulated the conceptual universes such as justice, equality, citizenship, eco-sensitivity; not only to challenge the dominant paradigm of development, but also to inform alternative strategies for sustainability. Moreover, their persistent usage as a tool for collective consciousness and mobilization in the realm of protests has created a new epistemic site for organizing theory that is necessary for those who participate and study the trajectories of movement. Once they become part of everyday practice, movements acquire new cultural identity among its participants. Similarly, their reflections and translations in different context connect the protestors from local to global. This study seeks to examine discursive/non-discursive formations of the people's protests in the Narmada Valley in central India. Despite persistent resistance and thereby generating critical discourses on environmentalism globally for the last three decades, people in the dam site were to be uprooted as the dominant paradigm of development submerges the idea of justice. This paper critically examines the dialectics of generic discourses on environmentalism: the movement known for its global strategies on the one side and the displacement that the nation-state required for harnessing the greater common good on the other. In fact it is the new properties of social situations derived from the political culture and their practices that inform and determine the theoretical validity of a universal language of justice as realizable.