Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and The Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India

Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and the Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India
Kaushik Ghosh
University of Texas, Austin
Not long ago, Arjun Appadurai stressed that we need to think ourselves beyond the nation (1996:158). His reason for this postnationalism was not only evidence of the unprecedented transnationalization of people and the mass media but also his political charge that the nation-state increasingly constrains the lives of local subjects who reside in its territory. Such subjects are forced to occupy neighborhoods that are produced by the nation-state as its own context rather than being contextgenerating themselves. Thus, referring to the Brazilian states brutalization of the Yanomami, Appadurai writes,
The Yanomami are being steadily localized, in the sense of enclaved, exploited, perhaps even cleansed in the context of the Brazilian polity. Thus, while they are still in a position to generate contexts as they produce and reproduce their own neighborhoods, they are increasingly prisoners in the context-producing activities of the nation-state, which makes their own efforts to produce locality seem feeble, even doomed. [1996:186]
According to this logic, then, the way out of such a connement in the nation would obviously lie in the increasing transnationalization of the locality brought about by mass-mediated discourses and practices, including the discourse of human rights, that tend to destabilize the nation-state. For indigenous subjects like the Yanomami, the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) has in fact become one such transnational space, producing new postnational contexts, and hence neighborhoods, a phenomenon that has been called a case of indigenous place making in the literature (Muehlebach 2001). I have no doubt that the WGIP is a transnational locality. I would also agree that it destabilizes certain national contexts of indigenousness. However, in this article I point out that such destabilizations may or may not help indigenous people in their specic struggles in relation to the nation-state and the various forms of capital that may circulate through it today.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 4, pp. 501534, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360. C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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Through an ethnographic narration of how the WGIP, as just such a transnational locality, meets up with a specic national context of indigenousness in India, I question the fait accompli of the transnational as postnational liberation. In fact, I argue that, in certain postcolonial contexts like India, WGIP-like transnationalism introduces a politics of place that undermines the struggles through which indigenous people have historically attemptedand to some extent signicantly succeededto wrest certain autonomies within the formal dominion of modern states. These strugglesmostly connected to rights to landhave a long history that is integral to the history of the modern state in India, both colonial and national, and their political idioms, aspirations, and imaginaries were forged and continue to circulate outside the contemporary transnational discourse of indigeneity. In relation to these struggles, this transnational discourse is marked by an awkwardness of t and a reconguration of the political process that ends up excluding the vast numbers of the indigenous who are engaged in struggles against neoliberal projects that threaten them with displacement. More alarmingly, although it makes these traditions of struggle invisible, this new transnational discourse of indigeneity has effected the production of a nucleus of new political leaders who no longer need to be involved with the everyday struggles of land and territory but are continually encouraged to perform and t the paradigms of a transnational indigenous subjectivity that has little resonance in the localities occupied by such populations in India. Consequently, the numerous indigenous struggles within the nation-state of India have failed to nd a larger national leadership, and newly formed indigenous states are being run by political parties and formations that have historically been populated by upper-caste Hindu groups, which are the principal source of exploitation of the indigenous peoples in India.1 At a time when the displacement of indigenous populations has gained new intensity under neoliberal state policies in India, the transnationalized leadership is conspicuous by their absence in the multiple sites of resistance to these new forms of displacement that mark the national map. The specic instance that I explore here is the case of the Koel-Karo movement in the state of Jharkhand in eastern India. It is a 30-year-old movement of Munda, Oraon, and other tribal (adivasi) villagers against the construction of two large dams of a hydroelectric project planned on the South Koel and Karo rivers.2 The movement was not organized by activist or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and although it is somewhat known to activists across India, it has received little media attention. Nonetheless, it is one of the rare examples of the successful prevention of the construction of massive dams on indigenous lands in India in a long and rich history of determined struggles in India by tribal peoples against forces of displacement. Today, as a transnational discourse recognizes these tribal populations as indigenous, it has attracted signicant participation by a group of elite adivasi leaders from Jharkhand and elsewhere in India. The participation of this elite has affected its understanding of adivasi culture and indigeneity in ways that shape its relationship to adivasi movements, such as the
INDIGENOUSNESS AND THE TRANSNATIONAL SPHERE 503
Koel-Karo, which are led by local adivasi villagers with little direct linkage to transnational forums. I argue that these local contexts can tell us much about the dangers of deploying a transnational discourse of indigeneity without attending to the nature of its specic translations in specic sites. If such struggles have emerged from a historical negotiation by adivasi groups of the modern state and colonial governmentality, then we must pay close attention to how this history articulates with the global discourse of indigeneity.3 The transnational discourse of indigeneity turns on a politics of recognition that is at the heart of the modern form of power we call governmentality.4 However, tribal populations, who are the objects of transnational indigeneity discourse today, have a long history of living other histories of governmentality in relation to the modern state, both colonial and national. The forms of recognition that were deployed in that long dur e of governmental power were forged in the interstices e of tribal resistance and state technologies of governance as a form of domination (Banerjee 2000; Ghosh 1999; Mamdani 1996). The constitutional, legal, and governmental rationalities of a nation-state such as India contain a variety of such grids of recognition in relation to adivasis. These need to be also looked at as a historical map of adivasi contestation of governmentality.5 Such a history has rendered the project of nation-state governance of such populations particularly open to counterrepresentations and resistance in the form of numerous and frequent popular adivasi movements like the Koel-Karo. In this article, through a brief reading of the Koel-Karo movement, I develop an analysis of how spaces of adivasi contestation emerge as unanticipated effects of the governmental rationalities of the nation-state. Through such a demonstration, I challenge the implicit dichotomy of the coercive nation-state and a liberating transnationalism that seem to inform the contemporary discourse of indigeneity in both the academy and the larger space of transnational activism, NGOs, and liberal institutions. Specically, I point to the problem of how the transnational discourse of indigeneity has insufciently grasped the openings that such populations have created in the folds of domination by the nation-state, and in fact it unwittingly threatens to undermine such openings by producing a different form of indigenous subjectivity that marginalizes the vast majority of the indigenous populations in countries such as India.6 In the next section, I introduce a brief sketch of adivasi struggles in Jharkhand in connection to the history of Indian modernity. These struggles have a rich 200year-old history, which cannot be grasped by trying to equate adivasi struggles to the congurations of a transnational indigenous subjectivity. Moreover, I suggest that adivasi subjectivity has an ambiguous location in national modernity in India, being both inside and outside the temporality of the Indian state, which allows us to understand local adivasi political consciousness as being both tied to the discursive contours of the Indian nation-state while not being fully contained within them. Following this, I develop a theory of two types of governmentality, both of which are necessary for understanding various forms of adivasi political
identity and explaining how adivasi movements like Koel-Karo emerge in relation to the history of governmentality in India. Having thus framed the space of adivasi politics within the nation, I then proceed, in the subsequent two sections, to provide a contrasting account of how transnational discourses of indigeneity affect the imagination of adivasi identity through the example of one of the prime leaders of the Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ICITP). In this context, I point to the enormous divergence in the understanding and deployment of notions of indigeneity by subjects who are differently located in relation to the transnational indigenous forum, in both its discursive and institutional manifestations. I also demonstrate how movements like Koel-Karo cannot be grasped from within the space of transnational indigeneity discourse. I then turn to a critical assessment of the latter in relation to adivasi identity. I demonstrate how the operation of a discourse of essential indigeneity severely limits the creativity of adivasi politics. A small example follows to illustrate the uidity and dynamism of an older adivasi discourse in Jharkhand, prior to and outside the transnational. The article concludes with a discussion of governmentality as a mode of power as seen through the example of indigeneity in Jharkhand that has been presented here. I point to certain problems in contemporary discussions of governmentality in academic writings and suggest that we need to be attentive to a heterogeneity in the processes of governmentality to prevent us from turning it into a form of all-encompassing, omniscient, and omnipresent knowledge. I end with an epilogue, which is again an invitation to think of other possibilities of radical knowledge and politics of indigeneity/adivasiness beyond the severely limited domain of a UN-based transnational imaginary of indigenous people. Indigeneity and Indian Modernity When it comes to indigeneity and indigenous resistance, our imagination has been deeply inuenced by a binary around the nation-state. Within the borders and the time of the nation-state, indigeneity is marked by exploitation and immense coercion. However, beyond the nation-stateor in the time-space of the transnationalindigeneity arrives as the time of resistance and rights, selfdetermination and sovereignty. Implicitly assumed in most discussions of indigeneity today, this binary has the effect of making invisible the histories of the struggles of tribal populations in the interstices of the discourses of state and citizenship, prior to their recognition in the transnational imaginary of indigeneity. Tania Lis otherwise thorough disassembling of indigeneity in Indonesia, for example, still tacitly traces a history that locates the origins of the struggles of such populations in the temporality of the transnational discourse on indigenous people [that] took hold in activist circles in the nal years of Suhartos rule (2000:149). Thus indigenous struggles are narrated today as an assemblage of the prior context of nation-state policies and coercions and the operation of a transnational indigeneity movement that is locally translated and deployed by activists and indigenous
people against the oppressions of that prior context. The historical struggles by the indigenous within the nation-state (i.e., before the time of the discourse of indigenous people) become invisible, and thus their impress on the processes of the contemporary cannot be recognized. In terms of the transnational indigeneity discourse, India has the secondlargest indigenous population in the world. As is the case with the Indonesian state, the Indian state does not recognize the legitimacy of using the term indigenous people for its tribal populations. However, unlike the Indonesian state, it has a long history of afrmative action and administrative and territorial recognition in relation to such populations. These forms of recognition have both colonial and postcolonial origins precipitated as a result of state efforts to contain a remarkably rich series of tribal struggles. In fact, the constitutional guarantees promised to tribal populations give us an inadvertent map of the history of these struggles. The term adivasithe most commonly used designation for tribal populations in India todaywas a neologism produced by Jharkhands tribal leaders in the 1930s, signaling the arrival of a new imaginary of a unied tribal identity. This does not mean that there is no circulation of the transnational discourse of indigeneity among adivasi populations in India. The ICITP, as the organization that most prominently represents the case of the indigenous people of India at the WGIP, is overwhelmingly composed of leaders from the Jharkhand state in eastern India.7 This is not surprising, because Jharkhand, which was granted statehood in November 2000 by splitting the existing state of Bihar, had been the site of the longest (more than 60 years) and best-known movement of adivasi peoples for territorial autonomy within the state of India (Devalle 1992; Jharakhanda Sahayaka Samiti 1988; Prakash 2001).8 In the course of the Jharkhand Movement, a significant middle-class adivasi leadership has emerged, as have a number of political parties that dene themselves through a discourse of adivasi identity (Sachchidananda 1979; Singh 2004). From the late 1980s, some of these adivasi leaders and young adivasi activists, who have signicant higher education and uency in English, have aggressively pursued the various international indigenous peoples forums, especially the WGIP, with the hope of advancing the cause of adivasi autonomy, including the demand for a separate Jharkhand state. The pursuit of this new form of politics was particularly made possible with the formation of the ICITP and the access to the WGIP that this enabled. The arrival of Indian adivasis at the transnational indigenous forum thus cannot be read as a nascent awakening of a spirit of resistance. Both the transnational indigenous people movement in Indian adivasi history and the more extensive movements for self-determination, such as the one pushing for the establishment of a Jharkhand state, are strands woven out of a longer, complex, and very active history of adivasi struggles in the context of the formation of Indian modernity, both colonial and national. The demand for autonomy in Jharkhand arose out of the experience of the predictable story of indigenous displacement in the face of development. Jharkhand has been Indias richest mineral wealth producer from the mid19th century.
Mining and other projects such as large dams, factories, and forest reserves have led to the severe territorial and cultural displacement of adivasis and their consequent conversion into a cheap labor force under both the colonial and national governments (Areeparampil 1989; Fernandes and Thukral 1989; Ghosh 1999). While the statehood movement has continued unevenly since 1938, there have been other, more localized movements against displacement through development, which emerged particularly from the early 1970s in Jharkhand as they did in other parts of India, most often in adivasi areas (Baviskar 1995). Of these, the Koel-Karo movementin the heart of Munda tribal landis particularly salient for having stopped any signicant land acquisition by the state for the hydroelectric project in the Koel and Karo river valleys. The project aimed at acquiring 55,000 hectares of land from a minimum of 112 villages, threatening about 150,000 people, for the generation of 710 megawatts of electricity (Madhukar 1992). As with most Jharkhandi local movements against displacement, local adivasi peasant leaders have led the Koel-Karo movement. The one among them who is most crucial to the movement and central to my account below is Soma Munda, a 60-year-old village headman who is also the elected ofcial of the panchayat (local governing council), which is the most basic level of government in India.9 It is on the land of his village that the main dam on the Karo River was to be built. Soma Munda is a subsistence farmer. He has never been part of the Jharkhand Movement for statehood. His class and political positionings exclude him from being an active part of ICITP. The reasons for this will become clear as we go on. This does not mean, however, that Soma Munda is unconnected to the Indian nation-state or to transnational spaces, although his connections may be different from those of the leaders in the ICITP. Apart from being an elected ofcial of the state, Soma Munda spent 15 years in the Indian army, took part in two wars, and in the 1960s was called up for duty in the UN armed force that was sent to Lumumbas Congo. Signicantly, a number of new leaders in Jharkhand who have been at the forefront of antidisplacement movements against development projects have had long years in the Indian military. This experience gave these new national subjects a close knowledge of the modern state. At the same time, they also embody an aura of essential tribal Otherness for the state itself. Army recruitment in Jharkhand from adivasi groups is very heavy, well beyond any measure of proportionality.10 At one level this has to do with the fact that the military is one of the few places in which adivasis are guaranteed a nominal equality and steady pay. However, adivasi recruits also would often recall the army as a place where we were respected for being especially good soldiers. As was the case with colonial labor recruitment, army recruitment is also deeply involved with an imaginary of the primitive otherness of the adivasi, which is uncontaminated by a weakness of the physique marking more civilized peoples (Ghosh 1999). This imagination is linked to the development of a discourse of martial races in the military recruitment practices of the colonial state during the 19th century (Fox 1985; Onta 1996). There are
important differences as well, which for lack of space I cannot go into here.11 Thus adivasis are positioned both inside and outside the state through these very practices. They are included through discursive practices that also simultaneously effect a necessary exceptionalism. Adivasis are aggressively recruited into the military, which lies at the heart of the states modernity project, but at the same time this recruitment requires them to be essentially outside the temporality of the modern. Subjects like Soma enter the state through discourses of a primitivist essentialism. They may be quintessential state subjects in one context and be outside or against the state in another; in fact, the two modes need not be in conict and may very well be connected. This in itself starts problematizing Appadurais concept of the nation as a restrictive context. The nation form produces its populations, such as the adivasis, through certain modalities, but these hardly function as one monolithic embrace that restricts the imagination of its subjects. Adivasi subjects are ambiguously located in relation to the nation-state, precisely because of the multiple and fragmented nature of the latter. This contingent nature of the state, produced out of the processes through which it constitutes its populations, is quite unlike the all-encompassing unity that citizen-subjects often assign to it in their imagining of what the state is. In this sense, the gure of the adivasi repeatedly acts as a deconstructive case in Indian modernity in particular and the metaphysics of the state in general. Indigenousness and Two Modes of Governmentality I propose that the inside/outside problem of adivasi ethnicity indicates two modes in which the modern state builds on a colonial originary framing of the primitive in India. Colonial discourse constructed tribal (adivasi) India as an irreducible otherness in relation to Hindu India. Tribals were pre-Aryan, and the Hindus were the Aryan invaders from at least 3,000 years ago (Trautman 1985). By and large, the Aryans were the bearers of civilization, and tribal India was outside of historical time or at least in the dawn of it. Adivasi rebellions during the colonial period often aimed at the Hindu landlords and moneylenders in their territories. Colonial administrators and historians explained such rebellions as a response to the continuation of an ancient racial order in which tribal non-Aryans were exploited by Hindu Aryan invaders, without mentioning how the nontribal landlords, moneylenders, and traders of the colonial period were a new population that had actually been created and encouraged by the colonial state in its effort to increase revenues and generate a sense of productive ordering of tribal lands (Guha 1983a).12 Having thus constructed this essential primitive otherness of Indias tribes, the colonial state would work on it in two dissimilar ways. One was a process of gradual assimilation through the rule of law and the market. In so doing, tribal othernessits relative remoteness from market exchange and private property, for
examplewould be recognized, somewhat adjusted to, but with a nal teleology of bringing the adivasi into the time of capital. This process of addressing ethnicity through inclusion I will call incorporative governmentality. The other process of working this alterity was the reverse. Here the essential pre-Aryan otherness was a signal for the separation of tribal India from the domain of an AryanHindu or Indian mainstream. The argument in this case lingered on the originary relationship between invaded and invader and the consequent need for protective justice that it entailed. This approach, of course, completely elided the fact that the vast displacement and severe exploitation of tribals under the colonial state were related to the new modes of colonial land tenure and the new landlords and moneylenders that these modes of tenure spawned, backed by the force of the colonial army. Thus, the numerous tribal revolts against the local landlords in colonial Jharkhand would become evidence of an age-old pattern of HinduAryan exploitation of pre-Aryan tribals. The result of such a framing would be protection in the form of tribal land protections, autonomous areas usually under the paternalist rule of a government commissioner or Christian missionaries. Such modality of government through exclusion from a putative mainstream has variously been termed as indirect rule, scheduled areas, or frontier agency. In such a process of protection through isolation, tribal ethnicity would be considered not easily compatible with market principles and capitalism (Banerjee 2000). They have to be ruled according to their customary laws, which then have to be discovered and documented. This is where colonial anthropology of course emerged. The more important point for my argument here, however, is that in this second form of relating to a foundational tribal otherness or ethnicity, the principle of recognition is that of exclusion. I will call this exclusive governmentality. It is from within this dichotomous frame of governmentality that our concepts of common law and customary law make their appearance.13 Thus I am dealing with two different modes of governmentality, both of which work through the recognition of ethnicity. States, whether they are colonial or postcolonial ones, in the very logic of accomplishing their governmental tasks in relation to their populations, recognize different subjectivities that do not fully correspond to the homogeneous time of the citizen.14 Governmentality and ethnicity thus have a close relationship outside of the homogeneous time of citizenship. However, put together, the two faces of colonial governmentality, which continue in the postcolonial nation-state, have complex effects on constructions of tribal ethnicity. The reservation of jobs in public institutions, rms, and ofcesa form of positive discrimination long extended to tribes and lower castes in Indiais the obvious example of an incorporative governmentality that most typically functions through enumeration. The tight t between identity and enumeration, which Bernard Cohn (1987) was one of the rst to point out, is well illustrated by the typical response of most literate Mundas to the question, Who is an adivasi? or Are Mundas adivasis? They would answer, Of course Mundas are adivasis; we
are on the Scheduled Tribe list. If you are an adivasi, then you are on the list, thus referring to the list of ethnicities that the state recognizes as Scheduled Tribes.15 Enumerated ethnicities are, thus, the objectied and generic products of the work of the state in recognizing cultural difference. As several authors (e.g., Anderson 1998; Chatterjee 2004) have pointed out, these ethnic categories are characterized by a rigid boundedness; they transcend context and are, thus, not fuzzy: You either are or are not X. These are the characteristics that make such ethnicities perfect terrain for the growth of nationalism, where identity and time have to be, at least ideally, homogeneous and perfectly coincidental (Appadurai 1996). Certain adivasi subjects like the adivasi middle classthe exclusive class identity of the ICITP leadersare clearly more exhaustively dened through state enumeration. Such a class, dependent as they are on schooling and urban ofce employment as their sole mode of economic survival, is a prime candidate for inhabiting this empty, taglike version of adivasi ethnicity.16 The adivasi populations that are directly targeted by the exclusive aspects of governmentality in India are largely rural. Unlike the middle-class adivasi populations who do not depend on rural lands or forests in the same immediate sense, these populations are engaged in agriculture and are signicantly dependent on their multiple uses of forests. Therefore, questions of land and displacement, as in the case of Koel-Karo, directly affect them, and the legacy and practice of exclusion or land protection have a daily relevance. But exclusive governmentalityalthough a signicant part of the modality of operation of the modern statealways has to be recessive to incorporative governmentality. The work of modernization and the rationalization of custom must continue somehow for the modern state. Protected tribes are brought in through institutions of missionary education, through banking and nancial exchange logic in the form of rural cooperatives, and nally through the generation of modern employment, typically in the form of migrant labor recruitment.17 But for its part, the originary essentialism of tribal difference continues to inect these rationalizations of an incorporative governmentality, as Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) has forcefully shown, as a cunning of recognition. However, it also often ends up making available a space for adivasis themselves to act on their putative irreducible otherness: they can both dene themselves in opposition to the state and a mainstream national community and devise projects of noncooperation around such an identity. In the following section, I sketch one instance of how the practices of exclusive governmentality have come to produce some key spaces within which very lively and intense adivasi protests and mobilizations have taken place in the last few decades in India. The Koel-Karo movement can be partially located within just such a space. Land Is What They Know to Live On. Money Is Not for Them Tapkara is a fairly important market center in the Torpa block of Ranchi district in Jharkhand. It is the most important market in the Karo region of the
Koel-Karo project. Apart from several streets of shops selling household provisions, clothes, medicines, and bicycles, two market days are scheduled weekly when the entire local economy is mobilized. Adivasis, converging on Tapkara from a number of villages in the area, sell their produce, forest products, timber, and rewood and buy a range of everyday items brought in by vendors who are connected to the national and international economy through complex networks of distributors, agents, moneylenders, and wholesalers. However, beyond the economic transactions, these markets act as a crucial space in which extravillage tribal sociality is produced and reproduced: news of births and deaths is shared, marriage proposals are made, friends and lovers meet, and the mail and money orders sent by migrant family members are picked up from the postman. If the colonial reading of the adivasi was that of a primitive who was not rational enough to grasp the abstraction of money and markets and thus adivasi society needed to be isolated from markets for its own survival, here we see the market in precisely the opposite guise. It is a crucial node in the reproduction of adivasi kinship and sociality. It also allows adivasis a space to interact with non-adivasi persons (dikus), especially traders, moneylenders, and others who would not necessarily be present in everyday adivasi village life. Such interactions act as contexts within which a certain kind of situated self-abstraction in relation to the larger world is produced. Kaleshwar Chowdhry is a trader (bania) who lives in Tapkara. I rst met Kaleshwar one morning at Tapkara market in 1995. I was with Soma Munda, who had reached Kaleshwars shop to sell lac, the resin-like secretion of certain forest insects used in the making of lacquer and varnish among other things.18 We sat on a bench in front of his spacious, warehouse-like shop; Kaleshwar sat on a mattress bed (gaddi) across from us. To his right were the large and ancient-looking scales used to weigh the bags of lac brought in intermittently by the villagers. In his fties then, Kaleshwar had studied at the local missionary high school with Soma. It did not take much time for Kaleshwar to start talking about the lack of development in the area. He mentioned how in another panchayat, the elected ofcial had organized the villagers to have a road built at minimum cost and had forced the government to provide all the funds. Kaleshwar was exhorting Soma to take this example and convince the people to come together and contribute to such projects:
How long do you think our sonsyours and mineare going to bike around? They have motorbikes today; theyll get cars tomorrow. Can anyone drive a car on these roads? Why cant these people [adivasi villagers] get their senses back and stop protesting against the government all the time? Okay, maybe [they] do not want the [KoelKaro] dam, why not the roads? They just dont know whats good for this place. Just imagine if there was a proper drivable road from Tapkara to Lohajimi.
Lohajimi is Somas village and the planned site of the main dam of the Koel-Karo project. Soma listened with his characteristic silence and a slightly amused smile. At last he spoke,
We had asked the government to build the road up to Kalet [a village ve kilometers from Lohajimi]. But it couldnt be the NHPC [National Hydro Power Corporation, the state corporation in charge of the Koel-Karo project] who could do that. NHPC has to go. Let the Public Works Department build it; let them entrust our village council with the job. The government insists it has to be the NHPC.
Kaleshwar now became less guarded. He had been trying to restrain himself from condemning the antidam sentiments of the people. But now he began a more direct attack: They will get so much more money than I or other traders would. Why cant they understand that it is to their benet to get this dam built here? Its lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of rupees, beyond the farmers dreams. Again Soma was amused. But he continued politely, You know how adivasis are, touching Kaleshwars arm in a gesture of feigned solidarity in their mutual knowledge of adivasi low consciousness and backwardness. He said, You give them money, and they drink it all uphere, there [latar-patar]; ghts, screaming, quarrelsthats what money brings for them. Land is what they know to live on. Money is not for them. How can anything work with that kind of talk? All development cant stop because of this! Kaleshwar was visibly irritated now. Well you go and convince them, I cant, Soma said. But you are the elected mukhia [panchayat head]; convincing ignorant villagers is your work. Lets say, then, that I have failed in that work, Soma said with great resignation but equally great condence. Later on as we walked out from Kaleshwars shop, I was wondering whether Soma Munda really believes that adivasis know little better than spending all their money in drinking. As we talked about it, Soma revealed that he did think that adivasis have a problem in handling money and resisting the temptations of drink. I then saw in one glimpse how Soma Mundas world, his understanding of his people and of the adivasi intellectuals understanding of that world, can never live outside the colonial discourse on tribes. Yet there was also that smirk on Somas face, and soon he was telling me how he drinks up profusely whenever NHPC or Land Acquisition ofcials are reported to be coming. Whenever he knows the powers he is dealing with are much too powerful for a dialogue and for his voice to make an impact, he submits fully to that statist symbol of savagerythe drunk adivasito redeem such racism as a weapon in the adivasis ght to save themselves. At the heart of the adivasi discourse of sovereignty based on land, therefore, lies the belief that the adivasi is incapable of handling money: Land is what they know to live on. Money is not for them. Although Soma articulated this in a dusty, remote corner of the world, the echoes of this truth about primitive nature reverberate through much of the colonial archive and are central to the arguments of Georg Simmels The Philosophy of Money (1990), the most extensive modern theoretical work on money (see Banerjee 2000). For Simmel,
money is the perfection of all abstractions. By allowing for fundamentally dissimilar objects to enter into exchange, money signies the ability to go beyond the concrete and the contextual contained in the social life of things. Money is not only a perfect form of abstraction but also a perfect form of purity, a human possibility that is unmarked by the vagaries of space and time. That is why money (and the state), for Simmel, is the truly universal. In this sense, money is the perfect embodiment of civilization and, along with the state, the sign of a universal humanity (Simmel 1990:82) that cannot be eroded or compromised by social conventions or historical accidents. In fact, Simmel writes that the inability to comprehend money in this abstract manner leads to the primitiveness of the primitive. Instead of grasping it as of purely mediatory value, the primitive conceptualizes money as a thing in itself. As a means to an object in the future, money leads to progress. It thereby demonstrates the functioning of the Hegelian Subject who can grasp the world objectively and thus act on it through an exercise of a rational will. The primitive, however, mistaking money itself as the end or as the object, is not able to will that future into being but is caught in the immediate present in which money is spent to produce an animal-like and sensual pleasure. Money as pure abstract exchange is investment for a deferred and more productive future (the kind that Kaleshwar imagined); money used in the primitive sense of an embodiment of immediate needs and desiressuch as alcohol and drunkennessis the primitive form of money or, in effect, the absence of it. The conversation between Kaleshwar Choudhury and Soma Munda expresses precisely this colonial common sense about tribes and Simmels logic of money and the primitive. Although Kaleshwar did not imply that the Munda adivasi farmers are primitives in Simmels sense of not knowing the true value of money, nonetheless, it is a widely held belief in Jharkhand and in India across various class and caste boundaries. Kaleshwar was not about to suggest this while trying to convince Soma Munda that the adivasis should accept monetary compensation for their land from the Koel-Karo project. Soma, on the other hand, returned precisely to this argument to indirectly argue for the impossibility of land acquisition based on monetary compensation and hence the improbability of achieving an adivasi consensus in favor of building the dam. What started as a racist logic in a system of exclusive governmentality prescribed for tribal regions of colonial India has come to produce a mode of resistance that the modern state had hardly bargained for! However, this essentialized, negative identity centers on the adivasi inability to grasp that the universality of money and modernity have had an important role to play not only in colonial paternalist protection or in Soma Mundas deployments but also in nation-state governance itself. In 1998, the Supreme Court of India passed a judgment whereby all development projects that threaten to displace adivasi populations must work with a land-for-land rehabilitation plan as opposed to rehabilitation through monetary compensation.19 Today, this has become standard for all projects displacing adivasis; rehabilitation cannot be done in the form of monetary compensation but
only through land-for-land exchanges. Yet this policy is not very practicable in a country as densely populated as India. Legally, at least, it is quite complicated to accomplish, and as a result there is increasing pressure from bureaucrats and industrialists to override this landmark judgment.20 What began as an act of exclusive governmentalitythe recognition of the negative and separate nature of tribal/adivasi identitybecame an aporia in the project of incorporative governmentality. To incorporate the subjects of alterity, to make them continuous with the time of the modern, the state now has to include this alterity as a conceptual basis of its actions. In the process, the very context of the nation-stateits legality and governmental projectsis fundamentally redrawn. Even more important, this reveals that the functioning of this exclusive principle of governmentality may at times interrupt the hegemony of the state and its projects of governance. If the original object of an exclusive governmentality, in the case of adivasis, was the prevention of revolts and other acts that challenge the legitimacy and the functioning of the state, in its reproduction by Soma Munda in the context of the Koel-Karo movement or revolt, we have the inadvertent result of the subversion of the project of development of the contemporary state. Not all situations would produce such subversion, but its very possibility, not to mention its actual materialization in different sites, becomes intrinsic to the process of governmentality and the career of the state. To speak of indigeneity in the Indian context, then, is to speak of a complex interwoven history of adivasi movements and exclusive governmentality. Together they compose an unstable discursive terrain within the history of national modernity in India. Persons like Soma Munda or new rebellions like the Koel-Karo movement are at the heart of a distinctly dynamic indigenous political world that holds much promise with regard to the possibilities of a politics of indigeneity. Such worlds are not receding residues of an original, authentic indigeneity. Rather, they are the products of a long struggle between governmentality, as a colonial and national mode of power, and adivasi populations. The latter are deeply marked by this struggle but as they inhabit and deploy this power they also rework it to produce unanticipated dilemmas for the state and corporations. Planning and the Matter of Self-Determination The essential lack in the adivasi, according to the modern stereotype, is also the lack of planning. Hence they have no ability to invest and no ability to handle money properly. PSM,21 one of the founders and ex-president of the ICITP, once lamented this while supporting the technology of big dams. At a seminar organized on the Koel-Karo project by anti-dam activists, he said, We need big dams; how else does any country get electricity? The problem with us adivasis is that we dont know planning. To live in the modern world you need to have minute-by-minute planning. Dams are not a problem, if we adivasis have our own state and if we can plan. PSM is of course part of a middle-class adivasi leadership that emerged out
of the opportunities made available through job reservation or afrmative action policies. Such a leadership was deeply involved in the demand for a Jharkhand state in the 1980s and 1990s. Their vision of ethnicity and its connection to the future state was also much closer to the enumerated ethnicity that is the effect of incorporative governmentality. PSMs vision of a Jharkhand state revolved around the preservation and nurturing of various tribal cultural essences built around the theme of harmony and equality, the supposed opposite of the caste principles of mainstream India. In a now famous pamphlet presented to the Indian government, he made the case for a separate state on the basis of these sorts of oppositions. However, in the very demand to locate ones ethnicity in the form of the modern state, which would run on the basis of modern planning, the pamphlet betrays the mode in which a middle-class Jharkhandi leadership nally has to collapse the problem of difference into the empty national time of statehood. Within such a state, PSM once said to an audience in the United States, proper cultural traditions will be preserved and improved. For example, if the dance oor is gone in a tribal village, so is the village. It is as good as dead. We must preserve and improve the dance arena in all villages; training can be provided to teach villagers the proper dance and musical traditions. So dance and village life are at the core of adivasi Jharkhandi identity, but these need to be identied, preserved, and objectied and then reformed to make them up-to-date and allow them to shine. PSMs specic training in linguistics at a university in the United States has spread into his translations of Munda oral poetry, which are done according to rigorous classicatory methods of linguistics, informed by his numerous Mundari grammar books and shaped by his attempts at the strict formalization of cultural idioms. One of his favorite projects has been to try and create a codied and formalized grammar of Jharkhandi dance and music in terms of the quintessential tribal village. For adivasi leaders, territorial sovereignty is imagined in the form of a modern state, and their political engagement has primarily taken the form of mobilizing demand for such. PSMs cultural nationalism, however, makes the matter of culture the exclusive domain of expert knowledge. Cultural activity then awaits state formation; once the state is obtained, cultural vitality is sure to follow. In this process of imagining the state as the key to all beginnings and cultural forms as a matter of expert knowledge, local, on-the-ground struggles to protect tribal land by tribal villagers become peripheral and even antagonistic to the understanding of the political of a middle-class adivasi leadership. As long as these leaders participated in the electoral process, certain solidarities with locals could be displayed, but this had no bearing ultimately on the modality of their political discourse, which was exclusively focused on getting statehood. As nationalisms histories have taught us too well, demand for statehood has to ultimately work through the production of hegemonies in relation to the masses who can then be led toward the empty homogeneous time of the nationstate (Chatterjee 1986). This would need an entire set of negotiations with various sectors of the population. The most elite of Jharkhands leadersin the condence
of knowing Jharkhand as a homogeneous, objective, enumerated ethnicity available for the shaping of expert knowledgehad moved far away from the project of producing such a nationalist Jharkhandi hegemony. By the 1990s, the so-called mainstream Indian parties had accepted the importance of the demand for a separate Jharkhand state, especially in the context of the increasing integration of the Indian economy into global markets and consequently the signicance of Jharkhands mineral and industrial wealth. This was particularly true of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The irony is that the Hindu nationalist movement has its origins among the traders (like Kaleshwar), moneylenders, and other petty bourgeois classes who are the most direct and visible exploiters of adivasis and against whom the latter have often mobilized.22 However, through organizing and building on the actual projects of governmentality or developmentschools, small-scale development projects, youth programs, employmentthe powerful Hindu nationalist movement started to win elections in Jharkhand from the early 1990s, while Jharkhandi leaders like PSM remained stuck with their imagination of a completed project of Jharkhandi culture that only awaited the gaining of statehood. Jharkhand was formed in 2000, initially through a formal legislative bill brought forward by the federal government, which was dominated by the Hindu nationalists who had made the issue of granting statehood to Jharkhand a part of their national election campaigns. The subsequent elections were overwhelmingly won by the Hindu nationalist coalition, and they formed the rst state government in November 2000. Since its formation, Jharkhand has been ruled by the BJP, although it has had token adivasi chief ministers drawn from the ranks of rural adivasi youth who had been recruited and trained by Hindu supremacist organizations for over three decades. Within the rst two weeks of the formation of the new government, it declared that building the Koel-Karo dam and the need to control militarily a growing Maoist guerilla movement in large parts of rural Jharkhand were the rst priorities of the state. Over the next few months the rural police were rearmed and put on high alert. Bunkerlike structures were built at police stations and outposts (Balagopalan et al. 2001). On February 1, 2001, the police opened re on villagers demonstrating in the Tapkara market against an instance of police brutality and killed eight people not very far from Kaleshwars shop (Balagopalan et al. 2001; Bhatia 2001). This was the rst instance of such violence in the 25-year-old KoelKaro movement. Following this incident, PSM and other middle-class leaders of the Jharkhandi political partieswho had been devoid of a formal political role in Jharkhand since the state was formedmade some perfunctory visits. Whether through the ICITP or any other organizations, they did not organize support for the terrorized populations in the Karo area; nor did they agitate against the killings in national or transnational forums. I return later to the fate of the Koel-Karo project, but here I want to linger on the middle-class adivasi leadership as the products of an enumerated ethnicity enabled by incorporative governmentality. By the late 1980s, this middle-class leadership
had formed ICITP, and by the middle of the UNs Decade of Indigenous People (the 1990s), they found in Geneva an alternate space of political potency. In this further removal from the nitty-gritty, on-the-ground realities of Jharkhand, such a leadership had even less space for struggles such as Koel-Karo. Being adivasi had taken on other meanings that were performed for other audiences and in other spaces. The consequences of such a remove can be traced through a conversation that I was part of in 1996 between Soma Munda and PSM.
Ethnicity and Its Fantastic Locations: Of Switzerland, Tapkara, and Other Tribal Places We sat in a tea shop in Tapkara, close to where the police ring claimed eight lives ve years later in 2001. Back in 1996, we were meeting against the backdrop of fresh initiatives by the Indian state to relaunch the Koel-Karo project.
Somaji, I heard that youve again got land acquisition notice from the government? Soma Munda: Yeah, we have got notice, but no one will sell. PSM: Somaji, the government is not going to stay put; they will put more pressure. SM: That is true, but see our point is very clear. We are following the law; we are going by the 1985 Supreme Court ruling on Koel-Karo. We have offered, as per the Courts decision that takes Bonai and Koche [two villages in the Karo area] as model villages and let the government rehabilitate them. A comprehensive rehabilitation has to be done; the Courts ruling includes the question of proper land, culture, sacred groves, and temples [sarna mandir] as part of rehabilitation. Kaushik Ghosh: Do you think we should really be going by the Courts ruling? Where at least 110 villages are to be fully drowned, dont you think it is dangerous to work with only two villages as a model? It is not so difcult to provide proper rehabilitation to two villages. But just on that basis they can start the work on the dam itself. This is a little problematic if you ask me! PSM: But it is a Bihar government job.23 There is so much bureaucracy and corruption [here] that I do not think they will be able to rehabilitate the people of Bonai and Koche and start the construction. SM: No, it is not easy. Rehabilitation has to take place in accordance to the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act [CNT Act].24 S. C. Roy has written in the act [here Soma mentioned clause and paragraph numbers] that in case of land acquisition based on the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, rehabilitation must be done with an eye toward not destroying the community. Thus, members of one patrilineal clan [killi] cannot be resettled in different places. So, if the government tries to relocate Koche or Bonai, then they will be taking members of the Guria clan away from the remaining members in the other 50 and more villages. Otherwise, they will have to take all the Gurias of these over 50 villages to one contiguous area. You tell me, where is that land in Jharkhand, where is it in the whole of India? We have always said, if the country will develop by sacricing us, we will sacrice ourselves, but we cannot do it illegally in opposition to the CNT Act and the Supreme Court! If the government can resettle us legally by the dictates of the act, we will move. But we know they cannot, they cannot do this thing legally. PSM:
PSM:
SM: PSM
SM:
Somaji, how will a country work if you say such things! In modern times you cannot stay put like that.25 It just wont do. I have a different suggestion. Why dont you let the government rehabilitate Lohajimi [Somas village]. You say there is no land, come on! The government should give us a piece of the Saranda forest, how much do we want after all! Just clear a piece at the edge of the forest, and if we can ensure it, we can make a beautiful village there, a model village for the whole of Jharkhand. Thats a good idea, but the work has to be done legally, by the Courts order. It is not possible to break the killi, otherwise you are very right. (clearly irritated): No, you dont seem to understand my point. Jharkhand can become a great place; our people can live in much better villages; we need to build well-planned villages. I have seen beautiful villages in Switzerland on the sides of mountains. We can have villages like those, absolutely beautiful, prosperous! Its very peaceful, those villages. Yeah, you are probably quite right. I agree with you, but the CNT Act is the problem; killis cannot be separated, unless one amends the CNT Act in the Parliament. After that even Lohajimis rehabilitation is possible.
Our strange and almost surreal conversation ended soon after this, with PSM leaving in his car and Soma and I turning back toward the newly resignied village of Lohajimi. We started climbing a slight hill along the red laterite road, very typical of Jharkhand. The late afternoon sun hung low on the horizon, a horizon lined with the silhouettes of a semiarid tropical vegetation; I looked aroundlocal date palms; the knobby, hardy sal trees; mahua, the ower of which makes the delicious drink of Central India; baer trees, known also as kul; muruhbah or palash; putush, a kind of shrub; bambooit was hard to imagine alpine pines here. I kept turning over the entire conversation in my mind. Switzerlandstanding in for Europe and Progress hereseems to always enter my life in a predictable form: it embodies a desire of the bourgeois subjects of marginalized modernities to have a heady, heavenly concoction of innocence and modern developmentunspoiled nature, white as the alpine snow; yet it oozes with the wealth and luxuries of modernity, a wealth that seems to leave no scratches on the surface of the earth. Later I would read Michael Taussigs (1995) recollection of a mythic Switzerland in the faraway, marginal modernity of his Australian childhood in the 1950s: the intense, bodyshuddering ecstatic opening of packages of Swiss butter sent by a grandmother who lived in Switzerland, the butter encompassing all that was excessively innocent and wealthy about a modernity that had eluded them in Australia. Now I desperately asked Soma, Did you make any sense of that, what they had come for? It worries me. To this Soma responded,
Dont worry so much, these people always come like thisby car, suddenly. I know very well what to tell them. Last month, when you were gone for those two days, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha party people had also come. It is time for the vote. They wanted to give leadership to the Koel-Karo movement. I kept saying, Yes, yes. I said if they give us support we will gain in strength, but we should lead our movement ourselves; if they want they can denitely give us support like the way we give to the Jharkhand movement, a little from the outside. When these folks come, I just keep agreeing, Yes, yes, You are right, and soon they depart and leave us alone; there will be no sign of them till the next elections. What rehabilitation and land acquisition?
Does anyone here have the courage to sell their land on their own? They will not even manage to save their lives; people will hack them to pieces. I am the panchayat head, even I, if I secretly take money for the dam, people will chop and throw away my head. These people just come and immediately leave again. We, after all, live right here.
Although I felt agitated by the insertion of Switzerland as a template for a future Jharkhand, I noticed that Soma Munda did not react at all to this point. I, on my part, had recognized in PSMs statement the continuation of a commonplace Indian bourgeois dream of Switzerland as the sign of a fantastic modernity. I still do not know what Soma thought then, but I suspect that his silence signied the impossible distance that has been emerging between middle-class adivasi leaders like PSM and Jharkhands subaltern classes. Switzerland, which seemed so close and plausible for the former, could barely evoke any meanings for Soma. This distance between two classes of adivasi leaders in Jharkhand points to a difference in the way adivasi identity and the very nature of the political are articulated among them. Here Switzerland embodies the locationboth literally and metonymicallyof the form of politics and cultural imagination that has come to inform leaders like PSM. It seems to spell out the radically different dreams that propel the elite and subaltern leaders of Jharkhands adivasis today. ICITP: Transforming the Adivasi into the Indigenous PSM was president of the ICITP at the time of the meeting in Tapkara described above. ICITPs exclusive focus is the WGIP located at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1987, ICITP has been demanding at the WGIP that the Indian state recognize the presence of indigenous peoples in India and their right to self-determination. The Indian state has characteristically responded that no scholar can say with any degree of certainty that the scheduled tribes in India are the only indigenous populations of India according to any established criteria. . . . There is no certainty as to who displaced who and which of the races in India today are the descendants of the conquered or the conquerors (ICITP 1989:8). The Indian government, on the other hand, recognizes the marginalization of lower castes and tribes in the paternalistic language of backwardness and weakness and accordingly holds out the constitutionally framed offers of educational and job reservations. Consequently, the status of all such groups, including that of tribes, becomes that of cultural minorities. As cultural minorities alone, however, it is difcult to gain from the principles of the UN Working Group, because the identity of indigenous is of paramount importance there: The term Indigenous people refers to populations living in countries which have a population composed of differing ethnic and racial groups, who are descendants of the earliest population living in an area and who do not as a group control the national government of the countries within which they live (WGIP 1983). As is well known, the specic histories of conquest in the Americas and Australia make such denitions fairly workable but, arguably, make the case more complicated for tribal groups in Asia and Africa. Lokayan, an Indian NGO, takes
on the problem in an interesting way in its report to the WGIP in its capacity as an NGO with consultant status in the United Nations. Lokayan wrote: What is of crucial importance is not the fact that a group of communities might be the only original settlers of the region or part of the original inhabitants of the area but the fact that the processes of colonization or colonial policies affected in a signicant and cultural manner the economies and the cultures of groups of populations (ICITP 1989:9). The effect on tribal populations has been especially deep, which the Indian state itself recognizes but tries to manage only through positive discrimination. Lokayan argues, however, that the policy of discriminatory protection was only available to a few (who could access it); they (the protected) became part of the mainstream economically, culturally and often times [became] mediators in the discourse between the mainstream and the large masses of the tribals whose lives remained untouched by the policies. Lokayan then adds, It is obvious from our report that the Scheduled Tribes are reduced to a colonial situation and are dominated by a system of values and institutions maintained by the ruling groups of the country (ICITP 1989:9). So, in the spirit of the resolution of the WGIP, the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes in India should be recognized as indigenous peoples. ICITP, however, persistently claims indigenous status based on origins and continuity. It is an effort to meet the WGIP resolution to the word. Through out the 1990s Decade of Indigenous Peoples, ICITP organized several conferences around the theme Who Are the Indigenous People of India, but this quite predictably proved to be a murky issue that is not quite amenable to rigorous scholarship. While ICITP ghts the Indian state in terms of a global discourse of indigenousness, it has been variously allied to several NGOs in Europe such as the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), headquartered in G ttingen. The discourse of indigenousness, o which such NGOs are deeply committed to, is one of an authentic indigenous culture, innocent and pure, that must be saved and liberated from exploitation by the various nation-states. Indigenousness: A Global Ethnoscape The operation of the imagination of indigenous people through the mechanisms of the United Nations and associated NGOs could be called the operation of a global ethnoscape, in the sense that Appadurai uses it. It is also a postnational global order where familiar anthropological objects have apparently been displaced. In Appadurais terms, the WGIP and ICITPs practices would imply that what it means to be tribal today can no longer be understood in terms of the local context and particular places. Rather, we have to look at how a global, deterritorialized imagination of indigenousness invokes and signies new effects of locality. Yet one still has to subject this apparently descriptive project to serious critique and ethical query. I still need to ask, If this is so, how do we evaluate this moment? What is our intellectual analysis of it? If this is the story of late modern primitivism, what
are the ways in which we can understand its effects, incitements, and exclusions? The ICITP, STP, WGIP, and the United Nations all form various pieces in this global ethnoscape, which turns on a certain affect: a neoprimitivist discourse of which many have lately written about (Brosius 1999; Conklin and Graham 1995; Tsing 2005). GB, an activist from the STP, on a visit to Jharkhand, once told me, I have never breathed such pure air in India. It is at one level the continuation of a much older discourse of primitivism, the invention of a pristine primitive gure who acts as a persistent critique of a decadent modernity. At another level, however, sutured to the discourse of governance and civil society and the economic reason of globalization, this discourse privileges a metropolitan activist as the sole moral authority in the judgment of third world nation-states in relation to their indigenous populations. This moral authority is pitched in the name of democracy via civil society, but its congurations are such that it does not need to engage with the specic histories and politics of the particular populations involved. By constructing a pure indigenous subject, this moral authority rst invokes the discourse of cultural rightsanother universalismand then goes on to create a domain of politics where individual states and their metropolitan judges are the sole agents involved in the production of democracy. There are many aspects of this imagination, including the formation of a new global, multicultural citizen-subject of late modernity. Is not this subject the European subject, the same one who initiated this fantasy of the primitive in the rst place? It is so, with an important caveat. z As Zi ek (1997) writes about the culture of multiculturalism, multiculturalists do not appreciate or depreciate the Other in relation to their own culture. They, in fact, disavow the position of being from a culture, a disavowal that makes them the ideological subjects corresponding to the new form of transnational capital: a global company that disavows any attachment to any particular nation while turning all nations into the zone of its colonization, including that which we may still associate it with. Through this disavowal, multiculturalists can be universal and thus partake equally of any culture that they may want to savor. The ethnoscape of a global indigenous people discourse is a similar zone of multiculturalism, the extreme visibility of the primitive body contrasting with the complete invisibility of the viewer. The critical modality of this transnational sphere is of course the attack on the nation-state. In the case of India, transnational indigenism reinvokes the older colonial imagination whereby all questions of exploitation of the tribal can be located in an original Aryanaboriginal conict, located deep in the very foundations of the entity called India. In this vision, the colonial state was the only guarantee of protection for the tribal. Amiya Kisku, the rst president of ICITP, thus said in a speech at the United Nations:
British colonial rule was interested more in money and wealth. But in the area of [the] socio-cultural realm, the British ofcials and scholars made extensive ethnographic, historical and religious studies. Indology developed as a distinct discipline and the philosophical, cultural and socio-religious values were spread all over the world. They tried to look at Indias social and religious customs and practices from a human and
humanitarian point of view. Anthropology as a separate discipline of studies also developed at university levels and castes, tribes, languages in India were widely researched, provision for political treatment of the depressed classes, tribals, backward communities were made for better administration and welfare. Provision for autonomous tribal districts were made. Some legislation [was] passed for the protection of [the] lands of tribal people; in Chotanagpur and Santal Parganas, Tenancy Acts were passed to save alienation of tribal lands into the hand of dominant society [HinduAryan groups]. In fact, the Scheduled Castes and Tribes were treated as indigenous people of India by the British colonial power. [ICITP 1989:1314]
In addition to the way in which this passage erases the entire history of conquest, violence, and cultural destruction under British colonialism, it also prepares the ground for the erasure of the modality of late capitalism. PSMs own response to the question of structural adjustment and its potentially very grave consequences for Jharkhand bears this same faith in metropolitan goodness. At a conference in the United States in 1995, PSM had commented: About the entrance of global capital, i.e. MNCs [multinational corporations], they are not at all a threat to me. World Bank people are after all genuine human beings, they will listen to the representatives of ICITP. At an earlier conference in India, Amiya Kisku stated: If we want to ensure our rights, we have to appeal to the international organizations, like the World Bank and the United Nations. The World Bank is with us, they have the most sympathetic charter for the protection of indigenous peoples interests and will be a safeguard against the Indian State (Kisku 1992). In this operation of a very different kind of White Love, which was generated in colonialism and is being reinvented in the contours of the indigenous people global ethnoscape, the operative logic is what Spivak (1988) has called white men saving brown women from brown men. Here we can appropriately replace women with indigenous people: white men (and women) saving indigenous people from brown men. In this particular love for indigenousness and the corresponding desire economy for whiteness lies the secret of the strange invocation of Switzerland on that afternoon in that rickety tea shop in Tapkara. The effect of the operation of such a global ethnoscape, in terms of place and locality, is thus the removal of a certain strand of adivasi leadership from a place-based practice of politics (Escobar 2001) and any signicant effort to enter into a dialogue with tribal villagers. The adivasi leadership become literally deterritorialized, not answerable to anyone in any specic site of Jharkhand. The mode of cultural imagination and the mode of politics in this transnational public sphere complement each other. Although its multicultural vision produces an essentialized, static, and authentic picture of adivasi identity, transnational indigenous people discourse removes all politics to the exclusive domain of transnational governance and civil society based on a discourse of abstract human rights. With such a coupling of culture and politics, the domain of culture gets delivered to the nal rule of law, which can operate in empty homogeneous time to guarantee the protection of an abstract, noncontextual culture of indigenousness. Culture, through this multicultural domain, now becomes cultural rights, fully guaranteeing adivasi identity as a contractual agreement in the terms of law.
Koel-Karo and other like social movements will then only work within the connes of law, and liberal reason and their sovereignties would nally be brought within the rule of citizenship, human rights, and civil society. Such a discourse of transnational indigenousness, gaining its power from primitivism and institutions of the United Nations, seeks out token indigenous persons who are amenable to this project of global modernity and who can also stand in for the indigenous populations concerned. PSM and various members of the ICITP are the token gures of this global discourse. In fact, through this new transnational domain of UN-based indigenous politics, the tokenized leaders nd a new way of remaining in political currency without having to address the undemocratic relations that divide them from the local adivasi enclaves. If one does not like what a Soma Munda may say about development, the law, or indigeneity or if he is not conversant with global fantasies and dreams emanating from Switzerland, one can just leave and return to the safety of the transnational indigenous space. Jharkhandi political society undergoes a further and more serious death in the process; and along with this political demise, the chances of a democratic tribal polity become even more remote. By inserting the modern essence of indigenousness into the new power of deterritorialized ethnoscapes, a new globality reinvents a museumized locality that is severed from the histories of struggle and imperatives of revolt. Contingency and the Imagination of Adivasiness In the ICITP-like imagination, as we saw with PSM, adivasiness as indigenousnesshowever complicated on empirical groundscan always be located in its wholeness in the past and the future. In contrast, the possibilities in that other space of adivasi ethnicity, where a Soma Munda puts together his local versions of adivasiness, can be quite unpredictable. This version of ethnicity and belonging is deeply contingent and is much more inventive and exible. Let me offer an example here. In the course of studying the Koel-Karo movement in the middle 1990s, I often wondered about the question of the collective. One of the remarkable aspects of the movement was the depth of the unity among the villagers of the Karo valley. How was such a determined collective forged? This was particularly important to ask in light of the fact that although the majority of villagers were Munda adivasis, a signicant number were from other ethnicities including non-adivasi ones. This included the Rautia community. Rautias are classied today by the incorporative developmental state under Other Backward Castes, a state classication for afrmative action purposes that indicates that, although these are not untouchable castes, they are low in the caste hierarchy and historically were discriminated against by the upper castes. From the early colonial period, however, Rautias used to be the local landlords in several villages of the Koel-Karo region, and the Mundas actively remember their exploitation by them. Although they were landlords, they were small and marginal ones; and after
independence, their situation has been worse than that of many Munda adivasi families in these villages. Largely illiterate, the community has not been able to develop much trafc with the lucrative domains of the modem state, and after the postindependence de-recognition of landlord ownership, they possess little land. In such a context, it is remarkable that Rautias and the Mundas were so closely allied against the construction of the Karo dam. I asked Soma about this: How is it that Rautias and Mundas have managed to remain united against the dam? After all, the Rautias were the landlords who forced the Mundas to provide corv e labor e [beth-begar]; so many people still remember their family members being forced to carry the landlords palanquin [dola] or working long days without pay on the Rautia elds. Soma responded with a glint in his eyes:
All this was true in the past. But they lost all their land after independence. Their ways have been mended as a result. Now they have become adivasis again. They work on these same elds themselves, just like the Mundas. They produce their lives with their own hands from this soil. They do not live like dikus anymore, living off other peoples toils. This land now acknowledges them. And their spirits [bongas], they are more numerous than ours, and all connected to this land, this forest. They live here.
This was an unexpected reading of adivasiness and indigeneity. In the framework of the state, the Rautias would certainly not be adivasis. Nor would they be so considered by most Jharkhandis, adivasis or otherwise. But within the local complexities of memory, the Koel-Karo movement, and the rituals of worship and work, new ethnic congurations become imaginable. Thus, reconstellating the category of the adivasi through an entirely different domain of materialityof land but of spirits tooSoma, paying little heed to state or ICITP efforts to dene adivasiness and non-adivasiness once and for all, makes possible a different future in this very present. Conclusion: Governmentality and Indigeneity My intention behind the critique of the transnational indigeneity discourse in relation to adivasi political life in Jharkhand is not about the establishment of a grid of authenticity involving an original local and a spurious global. I have provided an analysis of aspects of the discursive eld of the Koel-Karo movement that clearly emanate out of an older history of colonial governmentality without being strictly determined by it. Nor am I making a claim of a necessary impossibility of alliances between different local and global sites. In fact, I would argue that there is a great need for such alliances especially today, when, the developmental state of the postdecolonization era having been brought within the logic of neoliberal capital, most subaltern efforts to target the actors behind the various projects of displacement by demanding proper accountability from them are easily frustrated. Especially in this domain of pursuing global corporations and international investors and stockholders behind such projects, transnational activist organizations are now crucial. Yet it is precisely such alliances and reinforcements that have been
prevented because of the way that the transnational indigeneity discourse has recognized adivasi India through the ICITP. A politics of indigeneity that exhausts itself through the establishment of a pure and essential adivasi identity embodied in a handful of adivasi leaders, who in the process remove themselves from crucial struggles against the displacement of adivasi populations in Jharkhand and India, not only fails to produce those alliances but in fact attenuates these struggles. It is ironic that the Koel-Karo movement, which is one of those rare instances of a successful indigenous struggle against displacement through development, is what clashes with the indigeneity imaginary unleashed by the transnational indigenous movement. Rather than posing a question of the authenticity of ICITPs leaders, I am interested in the effects on adivasi populations of the politics of recognition embedded in the form of governmentality that is indexed in the transnational indigeneity movement of the WGIP. My approach to the transnational indigeneity discourse follows Tania Lis general query, What do these schemes [of improving the human condition or governmentality] do? What are their messy, contradictory, multilayered, and conjunctural effects? (2005:384). But in mapping such effects, I do not feel we can avoid politically and ethically evaluating them as well, which Li feels is the kind of weakness witnessed in James Scotts (1998) question, Why have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition failed? (Li 2005:384). Failure to evaluate these effects leads to a reading of governmentality where the differences among various histories of governmentality are made inconsequential. This happens because of an unexamined need to dene and map governmentality in an omniscient and universal manner. As in the case of Li, most commentators on governmentality are so focused on demonstrating the advantages of this formulation of power over older formulations such as James Scotts, which posit an outside to power, that we get a scenario where governmentality is turned into an all-seeing, omniscient, and omnipresent force that allows for no outside to it. Thus practices of governmentality seem to always be one step ahead of popular initiatives. Even when a particular governmental project fails, we still want to see in it a popular demand for a better project, thus plotting the remorseless setting in of the larger logic of bringing all humanity within the liberal discourse of demanding improvement and welfare from government. In the literature on governmentality, we consistently encounter a purposeful rationality of government that encompasses all initiatives for or against it. From the perspective of indigenous struggles like Koel-Karo, however, we would still need a more evaluative and less universalistic framework of governmentality. If the transnational indigeneity movement has failed to reinforce such struggles, then what, instead, has such transnationalism produced, and why? How does this help us in differentiating among different histories of governmentality in relation to the struggles of indigenous peoples? The last question also brings me to the question of agency in our formulation of governmentality. As I have mentioned before, exclusive governmentality in relation to adivasi populations in India involves a discourse of the adivasis being more
authentically rooted in the land as opposed to money and the market. Although this opposition of land and money has seeped into the legal domain as well as adivasi common sense, which then reappears as an important point of resistance against attempts to compensate the displaced through the more easily obtained package of monetary compensation, the recognition of adivasi rights to land was originally produced as a cumulative effect of massive and persistent tribal revolts against the colonial system of 18th-and 19th-century India and Jharkhand. Therefore, projects of governmentalityeven if they are denitively marked by liberal notions of welfare and improvementare also often determined by the history of subaltern (nonliberal) revolts. Such a history does not necessarily sit comfortably with the needs and compulsions of the regimes of modern governance. As we saw with the question of rehabilitation, distant events of adivasi revolts in the colonial past, through the machinery of governmentality, can produce a present reality that hardly meets the needs of a neoliberal government obsessed with the building of infrastructure, such as hydroelectric projects, to propel India into the league of superpowers. Governmentality, then, in practice is a deeply compromised game. It contains profoundly contradictory elements, largely because of the fragmented imprints of other forms of knowledge, ontologies, and temporalities. Unlike recent commentaries on governmentality (e.g., Li 2005), this does not lead to a picture of an all-knowing rationality that just cunningly recognizes and redeploys the histories of subaltern resistance without also unraveling itself. This brings me to the further issue of a tendency in recent literature to posit governmentality, explicitly or implicitly, as a form of power that precludes coercion. In Partha Chatterjees Politics of the Governed (2004), coercion and repeated violence remain unmentioned as he struggles to lay out a terrain of governmentality that seems to always operate through recognition, negotiation, dialogue, mutually agreed-on settlements, and inclusion. Chatterjees interest of course lies in establishing the framework of an alternate modernity where the liberal subject of European modernity is historically unavailable beyond a small section of elites. Governmentality becomes the form of power through which other subjectivities and temporalities could be recognized but also included within the modern domains of development, planning, and statecraft. In Chatterjees narration, these heterogeneous Others seem to always nd their designated slots in the planners map through a much contested but negotiated process. Thus there are extensive discussions in Politics of the Governed of the displacement and rehabilitation of populations in the course of development, but they are all resolved through mutual agreement without coercion or violence. It is particularly ironic to witness this analysis of displacement and governmentality, because displacement has become, from the late 1970s, one of the most contested and coercively settled realities of development in contemporary India. Adivasi revolts or movements against displacement, such as Koel-Karo, have placed the issue of development and dispossession at the heart of political debates in India today. Most such movements have not been interested in any negotiated rehabilitations and have only chosen to do
so after violent repressions orchestrated by the state and the private corporations involved.26 In fact, if we look at development from the perspective of subaltern populations, including adivasis, in India, it is much more deeply marked by coercion and violence than the negotiated platform that Chatterjee sketches. Coercion and negotiation work hand in hand in the terrain of governmentality, with the former delivering the target populations to the domain of the latter. Similarly, Tania Li writes, [Governmental] schemes work on and through the practices and desires of their target populations. They seldom use coercion, aiming instead to reshape the actions of subjects who retain the freedom to act otherwise (2005:384; emphasis added). Like the new Indonesian regimes efforts to formally distance itself from the coercive history of New Order Indonesia while eagerly building on all the political and natural resources made available through that history of violence and dictatorship, Lis version of governmentality makes invisible the memories and contemporary acts of coercion. This need to keep coercion, violence, and histories of popular revolts outside the theory of governmentality is possibly a result of too eagerly expanding on Foucaults sense of governmentality as a radically new form of power that signaled the end of the absolutist state. Posing the bourgeois subject (of civil society) as marking the emergence of a form of disciplinary power beyond the repressive, Foucault developed governmentality and population as concepts that take us beyond statist or absolutist notions of power built on the dichotomy of state and society. However, for Foucault these two kinds of powerdisciplinary and governmentalare really convergent, and they merge together to produce the general entity of biopower that marks modernity (Gordon 1991). Without one, you cannot have the other. Partha Chatterjees argument (2004) turns around a critique of a normative modernity that is constituted around the disciplinary power embodied by the bourgeois individual and the form of contractual collectivity called civil society. Such a subject is scarcely available in the colonial and the postcolonial world, he argues, and he turns instead to governmentality as the domain of power where the scripts of modernity are produced in the postcolonial world. The problem here is the misreading of Foucaults work as containing two distinct forms of power that can be treated separately. If civil society and the bourgeois subject are compromised in the colonies and the postcolony, then governmentality and populations also need to be treated as similarly incomplete powers and in need of radical questioning. What are governmentalitys forms in the postcolony? How is it transformed beyond the certainties of liberal principles of government? Without attending to these details and detailed translations, we would actually be imposing the liberal apparatus of governance, which is so centrally placed in the heart of transnational capitalism today. Studying the Koel-Karo movement in comparison to the indigeneity of a transnational governmentality allows us to rethink governmentality as a contingent, contested, and fragmented form of power. Whereas the transnational discourse of indigenous subjectivity can hardly recognize the popular imaginaries of indigeneity
in Jharkhand, the latter cannot be contained within governmental rationalities developed by the modern state in India. It also brings to light the need for the ethical reading of various strands of governmentality in the interest of the popular struggles of the indigenous against governmental projects of displacement. Without these moves we are prone to the problem of either uncritically celebrating the transnational as the moment of liberation for indigenous and other marginalized populations or reproducing an academic malaise of propping up a theory of an all-encompassing governmental power. Epilogue Unlike 2001, when the police killed with impunity, 2002 started incredibly well for Koel-Karos villagers. In January, NHPC pulled out, citing the total lack of land acquisition for the project. The Department of Land Acquisition replied saying it wished that NHPC ofcials were the ones in charge of this job, because to go into those tribal villages is to risk your life. You can be lynched any moment. Not a single of our employees are willing to go there any more (Kumar 2002). In the context of Koel-Karo, where the 28-year-old movement had remained nonviolent and where people had planned to remain so even after the killings, this was more than a little ironic. A week after the announcement, I was visiting Lohajimi village on the occasion of the funeral of an octagenarian priest who had died a few days before. Late in the day, I sat with a group of friends, drinking the rice beer specially made for the funeral. Some of us sat on a long bench; others sat scattered on roughly hewn wooden chairs and palm-leaf mats. One of the men, referring to the news of NHPCs departure, said to me, OK, now you too are free. Now we are safe; our culture [sanskriti] will be here with us. Before I could reply, I felt a stirring next to me. It was Soma. He looked down at the ground in the fading light and then began to speak. Culture is not that simple, he said in a soft voice: I have asked many people about culture old people, young people; villagers, ofcers; Mundas, Rautiasno one can say exactly what it is! What are its qualities? A rooster ran across the yard, and Soma followed it with his words:
Does it have a beak like this bird, or does it have lips like us? Does it have a comb on its head, or does it have hair? Is it feathered, or is its skin not covered? Is it steady as a tree, or is it supple like a creeper? Can you cut it into pieces, or is it like water? Can you nd it in a book, in the documents kept in the Commissioners Record Room? Even old people cant tell! Where does it start, where does it end? How old is it? No one knows. But one thing is certain, it is there!
Notes
Acknowledgments. I thank Ann Anagnost, Partha Chatterjee, John Kelly, and seminar audiences at the Universities of Chicago, Oregon, and Texas (Austin) for their comments and discussions of earlier versions of this article. The suggestions made by three anonymous
reviewers of Cultural Anthropology also proved to be very helpful, although I may not have incorporated all of them here. The Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Institute for Indian Studies generously funded a part of the research on which this essay is based. The usual disclaimers apply. 1. Strictly speaking the terminologies indigenous, adivasi, and tribal do not overlap easily. They roughly mark the transnational, national, and colonial histories through which indigenous populations have been bound to modernity. Although I have sometimes used indigenous for adivasi in this article, the troubled relation between the transnational indigenous discourse and adivasi politics in India have been consciously developed throughout my argument. 2. The term adivasi dates back to the 1930s and has its roots in the formation of the Adivasi Mahasabha, one of the early organizations that demanded the formation of a separate tribal state of Jharkhand in eastern India. Jharkhand was formed as a separate state in 2000, but its adivasi identity has been deeply compromised. Most of the state and market institutions are markedly controlled by non-adivasi, upper-caste, or other privileged groups that have historically been the most prominent exploiters of adivasi populations. See Corbridge 2000, Ganguly 1969, and Sengupta 2003. 3. See David Scotts (2005) helpful discussion of the concept of colonial governmentality. 4. Although Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) does not use the term governmentality for her analysis of the politics of recognition of the aboriginal rights to land and difference in relation to the Australian state, its legal machinery, and its discourse of multiculturalism, her analysis is one of the nest examples of how contemporary discourses of indigeneity and governmentality reproduce each other. 5. This alternate reading of colonial/national registers of the tribal slot might be read as adivasi agency, in a spirit similar to Ranajit Guhas (1983a) methodological suggestion of how to read the signs of subaltern agency in the historical archive. 6. One should note that this critique of the transnational discourse of indigeneity is different from the two offered most commonly. One of them, most typically embraced by states in the developing world, argues that indigeneity does not apply to a specic state or region because there is no universally acceptable denition of the term. Thus the Indian state argues that it is impossible to determine who is more indigenous (in the sense of original) than the other in a country such as India. The other critique, widely made by leftist commentators, is that this is an extension of identity politics that would only lead to ethnic conicts and thus undermine the possibility of wider class- or exploitation-based alliances. Karlsson (2003), writing about the issue of transnational indigeneity discourse with specic reference to India, has called these critiques substantial and political, respectively. 7. There are newer organizations of Indian indigenous peoples that have emerged in the last several years, for example, the All-India Coordinating Forum of Adivasi/Indigenous Peoples. 8. Adivasis of Jharkhand and Nagaland have been the most active in tribal struggles in India. The former demanded statehood within the Indian constitution and national territory, whereas the latter demanded a separate sovereign nation-state. Not surprisingly, the ICITP has been overwhelmingly composed of tribal leaders from these two regions. 9. Some names have been changed to protect the persons concerned. 10. The Bihar Regiment recruits from the state of Bihar, which included Jharkhand until 2000. This regiment had more than 50 percent adivasi representation among its soldiers, although before Jharkhand split away from Bihar, the adivasis represented only 7.6 percent of the state population. See Census of India 1991.
11. One crucial difference is that Primitivist notions attached to adivasis are more oriented to the notion of a pure but tractable nature untouched by civilizations corruption. Tribal/adivasi populations were imagined as being always outside the history of the state, unlike the martial races such as the Sikhs or Gurkhas, whose visibility came from them being associated with martial service in precolonial states. 12. See Hunter 1868 for a classic work of this colonial genre of historiography. Unsurprisingly, Guha (1983a, 1983b) repeatedly delves into it in his writings on adivasi subaltern rebellions. 13. Mahmood Mamdani (1996) develops an argument around a similar divide between two forms of governmental subjections, the citizen (common law) and the subject (customary law). However, Mamdani assumes that customary law governance was not applied to land in the colonies till its development in Africa. The tribal areas of India, especially Jharkhand, or Chotanagpur as it was then called, had this form of governance of land and territory from 1832 onward about 75 years prior to its application in Africa. Chronology aside, Mamdani implicitly assigns all agency to the colonial state in the institutionalization of customary law. This ignores the context of tribal rebellion, which forces the colonial state to come up with new forms of control, such as customary land laws. With his opposition between citizen (good) and subject (bad), Mamdani fails to grasp that the framework of customary law administration of land is an implicit acknowledgment of a resistant anticolonialism that could generate an alternate politics against state power and capitalist expansion. My argument here suggests an alternate reading of the problem of governance in customary law situations. 14. This is something that both Partha Chatterjee (1998, 2004) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) have noted in different ways. 15. Scheduled Tribe is the ofcial state category that is used to decide which ethnicities fall within the various domains of Indias afrmative action policies targeting adivasi populations. 16. Susana Devalle (1992) provides a perfect example of this when she writes of the decontextualized display of bow and arrows that adorn the living room walls of many middle-class adivasi homes. 17. Even in the more contemporary multicultural recognition of difference, as Povinelli (2002) has shown, the operative logic is to make the primitive transact harmoniously with the modern, multicultural nation-state. In fact, the primitives difference itself is turned into a value that is consumed by the multicultural citizen. Is multiculturalism a synthesis then of the inclusive and exclusive varieties of governmentality? 18. The specic insect is Coccus lacca. Lac continues to have a signicant global market, although in many of its other applications (e.g., electrical insulations) it has been replaced by synthetic substitutes. 19. There is an extensive activistpolicy literature on the question of land-for-land rehabilitation, especially in relation to adivasi populations. See Patwardhan (2000) for a fairly representative summary of the arguments. 20. Recent events in relation to the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) on the Narmada River in India both conrm this reading and indicate that the Indian states legal system as willing to subvert its own laws in the interest of neoliberal capital. Although it is obvious that there is little suitable land available for those who will be displaced by the SSP, the courts have allowed the work to continue while asking for all rehabilitation to be completed virtually in a month prior to when the monsoon rains set in. Given that dams, once constructed, will ood the submergence zone, this is as good as a forced eviction of the villagers in that zone. See Ghosh and Babu 2006. 21. PSM is a pseudonym. His name has been deliberately changed and abbreviated here.
22. BJP and the associated organizations of the Hindu nationalist movement (Hindutva), such as the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, had been particularly active in the adivasi areas, including Jharkhand, from the 1970s, with the intention of countering Maoism and Christianity, both of which have a large presence among adivasi populations. Hindutvas support for the formation of Jharkhand was a mid-1990s phenomenon. Earlier Hindutva refused to accept the term adivasi (original inhabitants) because it connotes tribals as a population that predated the HindusAryans in India. Also, adivasis were earlier frequently referred to by the Hindutva movement as vanavasi (forest dwellers) and vanarasena (army of apes), in a racial and chauvinistic deployment of a theme from the epic Ramayana. Similarly, it was not till the mid-1990s that Hindutva accepted the term Jharkhand, because it originated in Mughal (Muslim) textual sources and maps. Hindutva had tried to promote the more clearly Sanskritized and thus Hindu term Vananchal (forest region) instead. 23. Jharkhand was a part of the state of Bihar until 2000. Bihar is stereotyped as enormously corrupt and inefcient, a basket case in media speak. 24. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908) is the landmark act that recognizes the customary right of adivasis over land. It was necessitated by the Birsa Munda Revolt (1895 1900), which was particularly active in the Karo River area where the Koel-Karo project was planned (Singh 1983). S. C. Roy, the pioneer of Indian anthropology, a lawyer by training and keenly sympathetic to the tribal situation under colonialism, was one of the primary persons responsible for drafting it. 25. The image of the adivasi or tribal society being sedentary and therefore an obstacle to the dynamism of capital is supremely ironic because adivasis, especially from Jharkhand, have been one of the most migrant of all populations in India from the late 18th century. For the historic adivasi migration as part of colonial indenture work in the 19th century, see Ghosh 1999. 26. The history of the Narmada Bachao Andolan is particularly instructive here (Baviskar 1995; Sangvai 2000).
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ABSTRACT A critical examination of the transnational discourse of indigeneity in the context of adivasi or indigenous peoples political struggles in India contrasts two Indian indigenous political movements: the transnational imaginary of the Indian Council for Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which is the central organization representing Indias indigenous peoples at the United Nations, and the local imaginary of the Koel-Karo movement, one of several adivasi movements against displacement that mark the Indian political landscape today. Given that these transnational and very local imaginaries both work in relation to different domains of governmentality, I question why a transnational governmentality involving indigenous peoples produces a static and essentialized discourse of indigeneity that inadvertently undermines local initiatives like Koel-Karo. Rural adivasi populations redeploy elements of colonial and nation-state governmentality forged in relation to them in ways that demonstrate a remarkable exibility in the imagination of indigeneity. As the neoliberal regime in India has, with a terrifying intensity, contributed to the displacement of adivasis, the question of
indigeneity as adivasi identity has to address these different histories of governmentality, the modalities of the politics they have precipitated, and other ways of articulating local adivasi movements with transnational alliances. This examination of indigeneity in India concludes by problematizing some of the ways in which contemporary academic discourse has interpreted governmentality in relation to subaltern movements. [indigeneity, transnationalism, governmentality, India, Koel-Karo]

Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and The Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India

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Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and The Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India

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Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and the Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India

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