Adivasi Movements In India: Historical trajectories and contemporary scenarios

Adivasis (or Scheduled Tribes) it has been argued, are among those who ‘have gained least and lost most from six decades of democracy and development in India’. This fact is manifest across the regions of the country in which tribal groups are concentrated, where chronic poverty and dispossession intertwine with political disenfranchisement keeping Adivasis at the very margins of India’s much-vaunted growth story.

However, this marginalization has not gone uncontested. Across India, Adivasis have challenged their adverse incorporation into the country’s political economy in a myriad ways – ranging from the persistence of their socio-polities, engaging in grassroots struggles for democratic rights and entitlements, via large-scale social movements against resource capture and displacement linked to transnational advocacy networks, to participation in Marxist Leninist inspired armed insurgency. The outcomes have been multiple. They all warrant the attention of critical scholarship.

In this seminar, Alpa Shah and Alf Gunvald Nilsen draw on their research in the states of Jharkhand (eastern India) and Madhya Pradesh (western India) to discuss how Adivasis in different parts of the subcontinent have developed different forms of activism and resistance in order to contest their domination, material deprivation and political exclusion. Shah and Nilsen will interrogate the historical trajectories that have shaped domination and resistance in India’s Adivasi heartland, and discuss the comparative lessons that can be drawn from different contemporary scenarios of mobilization.

Alpa Shah is a Reader at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. She is the author of In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (Duke University Press, 2010) and a wide range of articles addressing inequality and radical politics. She is also the co-editor of Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in South Asia (Social Science Press, 2013) and Windows Into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal (Social Science Press, 2012).

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen. He is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010) and a series of articles on social movements in contemporary India. He is also the co-editor of Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance (Palgrave, 2011) and Marxism and Social Movements (Brill, 2013).