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Indian Government has repeatedly described Maoist guerrillas as 'the biggest
security threat to the country’ and Bastar in central India as their
headquarters. This book chronicles how the armed conflict between the
government and the Maoists has devastated the lives of some of India's poorest,
most vulnerable citizens, starting from 2005 when a government- sponsored vigilante
movement killed hundreds and drove thousands of villagers into camps, to the
present day when it is the most militarized region in the country. It is not a
coincidence that Bastar has some of India’s biggest mineral reserves.
Based on extensive field visits, court testimonies, government documents and an
active participant role in the events she writes about, Sundar also
tracks the responses of political parties, the media, human rights activists
and the judiciary to the ongoing crisis.
Anthropologists are often accused of wanting to keep tribals or indigenous people as museum pieces. Subalterns and Sovereigns shows how misplaced this charge is, arguing that forested and hill areas like Bastar have never been outside the ‘mainstream’ of history, and that the flattening out of local politics to create the appearance of isolation and homogeneity is essentially a product of colonialism and post-colonialism. The choice today, as in the past, has never been one between ‘tradition’ and ‘modern civilisation’ or between ‘development’ and ‘backwardness’, but over alternative visions of democracy.
By exploring the expansion of the state in Bastar over the past century and a half, and resistance to the particular forms it has taken, this book has been part of redefining the way in which history and anthropology are thinking of tribal India.
Based on an unusually rich combination of field and archival research, deployed in methodologically innovative ways, the book is divided into three parts: the ethnohistorical first section portrays the pre-colonial economy and polity, showing also how the significance of kingship and Bastar’s famous Dussehra festival have changed over time. The second part uses more standard archival sources to explore critical rebellions, yet these too are countered by oral histories of the same events. This section documents the growing restrictions on popular access to land and forest, the multiple historical understandings that shaped the encounter between different actors, and the relationship between colonial anthropology and contemporary laws. The final section, `Uncertain Futures,' highlights the contradictions faced by tribal societies today. The book is brought up to date for the second edition, by an afterword on the ongoing Naxalite movement and the government’s counterinsurgency efforts in Chhattisgarh.
Many of the major struggles in India today are taking place around the right to use or exploit natural resources. In the first volume of its kind, Legal Grounds explores the ways in which the law structures identities and access to resources, and how people use it to stake claims about citizenship.
Using the particular case of the state of Jharkhand, the volume raises larger questions about colonialism, globalization, and the rule of law in a postcolonial society divided by class, ethnicity, and gender. The essays examine rights, laws, and policies on land, forests, water, mining, and self governance, engaging with a wide range of issues: how are notions of customary law used to make political claims; what are the different ways in which personal laws are read by courts and village councils; what are the multiplicity of forums in which people struggle for justice; and why do people choose not to engage with some sites of law. The volume shows how subsistence needs force people to negotiate the blurred lines between legality and illegality, and how people yearn for the state to observe its own laws, even as they protest against the content of the laws.
An important contribution to the debates on the functioning of law in postcolonial India, this volume will be of interest to a wide cross-section of readers—sociologists, political scientists, development studies scholars, activists, lawyers, as well as the lay reader.
Anthropology and sociology have long histories in India. Yet, with the exception of fieldwork experience, there is neither much material on the institutional and material contexts of these disciplines, nor on the practices of pioneering anthropologists and sociologists.
The present book fills an important gap. While the sociology of India is not purely a national phenomenon (significant scholars and centres studying India exist outside), and while ‘Western’ theories have been important, this book shows that local influences and personalities played a major role in shaping the field.
This volume spans a century of life and work, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, and focuses on scholars with varying research trajectories. However, it also shows the threads that bind these scholars and mark out the particularities of the Indian experience: for example: their common concern with nation-building, social reform, and the value of science.
Combining biography, institutional history and critical assessment, this book will interest all anthropologists, sociologists and South Asianists, as well as those interested in intellectual history and biography.
Joint Forest Management (JFM) is a relatively recent attempt to make Indian forest policy socially responsible. Through JFM, people can contribute to and benefit from the regeneration of forests. This book shows, however, that JFM, far from being a simple, unified programme, consists of debates, policies, and practices, all recent in ecological and institutional terms, and all continually evolving. Through detailed study of 16 villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh the authors show how the livelihood objectives of poor people living in and around forests are still far from being met. The problems JFM set out to address and the objectives it was meant to fulfil have been deeply contested by the state, NGOs and villagers. Even as sources of income and subsistence for villagers, conflicts over objectives remain, for instance, between men and women, and between people of different occupations. Despite the official explicit objective of JFM—the afforestation of degraded lands—this book shows that in practice, governments have had other implicit agendas. In the process of implementing ‘participatory’ forestry, communities and their needs are being reconfigured. While there are grounds for hope that Forest Departments and village institutions can work together to make a success of the new initiatives, several issues still need to be addressed, including the role of NGOs and the organisational culture of the forest department.
The desire to enhance participation in forest management has had a high profile in Indian policy-making circles since 1988 but the attempts to introduce new institutional arrangements have been poorly understood. This book brings together the results of researches in many different parts of India, giving a historical perspective on the nature of ‘the community’ which is expected to participate, as well as a theoretical discussion of possible forms that participation might take. Several of the papers attempt to unpack the discourses that have currently developed around the questions of gender, community, NGO and forest department roles and ask how these constructions actually hinder a realistic understanding of the issues involved.
