The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi

by Rycroft; Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780415600828
• ISBN10: 0415600820
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This volume responds to the need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India. The volume engages in this process by defining a new field of Adivasi studies. As such it prompts a close review of the political and sociological categories of tribal peoples and Indigenous peoples. This process is driven by the relevance of the Indigenous movement worldwide to current research in India. Since the 1990s, and the formation of the International Decade of the World's Indigenous Peoples, this movement has influenced Adivasi self-perception and self-representation.Contributions address the following concerns: the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries; the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept; critical interest in Adivasi historiography via oral and visual ethnographic methodologies; the politics of historical representation and collective memory; the interface between Adivasi activism and academic discourse; and the environmental aspects of Adivasi protest and identity.This book discerns the disciplinary implications of Adivasi studies, both in terms of its methods and approaches and its relations with other existing fields, such as Tribal studies, Subaltern studies and Indigenous studies. As such, it is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies more generally.

Table of Contents

List of maps	p. xi
Notes on contributors	p. xii
Preface	p. xiv
Hul Johar/Acknowledgements	p. xvi
Indigenous pasts and the politics of belonging	p. 1
Contesting categories, blurring boundaries	p. 15
The dangers of belonging: tribes, indigenous peoples and homelands in South Asia	p. 19
Performative genres as boundary markers: folklore and the creation of Purulia as a border zone	p. 44
Revisiting resistance	p. 59
Rebellion as modern self fashioning: a Santal movement in colonial Bengal	p. 65
Reconstructing an event: the Great Rebellion of 1857-8 and Singhbhum Indigenes	p. 82
Landscape and Adivasi agency	p. 97
Customary rights and resistance in the forests of Singhbhum	p. 103
Standpoints and intersections: towards an indigenist epistemology	p. 119
Politics, participation and recognition	p. 137
Sovereignty through indigenous governance: reviving 'traditional political institutions' in Northeast India	p. 141
Aid, Adivasis and aspirations for development in western India	p. 154
Politics, development and identity: Jharkhand, 1991-2009	p. 175
Mainstreams and margins	p. 191
Using the past to win the present: peasant revolt, political parties and the print media in leftist West Bengal	p. 199
Who cares for a new state? The imaginary institution of Jharkhand	p. 217
Index	p. 231
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