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“Intimate Antagonisms: Adivasis and the State in Contemporary India”
Speaker: Dr. Uday Chandra, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen
In interrogating adivasi politics in contemporary India, this Talk departs sharply from dominant representations of adivasi politics today. It does so by challenging the easy binary between the modern state and adivasis in India based on three years of doctoral research on the relations between colonial and postcolonial states and rural adivasi communities in the forest state of Jharkhand in eastern India since the late eighteenth century. In my doctoral dissertation, I show how the “state” and “tribe,” paradoxically, constitute each other over time in the margins of modern India. The “state” here is both an idea and a set of governmental practices (Abrams 1988; Mitchell 1991) just as the “tribe,” too, is an ideological as well as material formation. My argument here is, briefly, that the two are isomorphic, and that subaltern resistance, whether violent or peaceful, is best understood as the negotiation, not negation, of modern state power.
This argument necessarily runs against a dominant strand of scholarship on South Asia that regards adivasis as subalterns par excellence and identifies Adivasi politics as primarily one of negating or opposing modern state structures (see, for example, Guha 1983; Bhadra 1985; Skaria 1999; Mayaram 2003). Yet, it also stands in solidarity with other scholars who have, in their distinctive ways, questioned these dominant logics of representing adivasi politics visa-vis the modern Indian state (Béteille 1974; Guha 1999; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Prasad 2003; Chatterjee 2013). The two case studies in this paper zoom in on intergenerational and gender divides within rural adivasi communities, and highlight how these intra-community divides mirror divisions within modern state imaginaries. I rely here on my fieldwork in contemporary Jharkhand as well as a critical reading of secondary sources on Jharkhand and other “tribal” regions in India and beyond. Might the apparent opposition between “state” and “tribe,” I ask, be better characterized as an intimate antagonism? If so, what might be the implications of such a characterization of adivasi-state relations for global debates over indigeneity and its futures?