How and why have India’s indigenous people become entwined in the world’s longest running armed revolutionary movement? This lecture will explore the spread of India’s Marx, Lenin and Mao-inspired insurgency into the Adivasi forests of… Read More »Adivasis and the Naxalite Insurgency

The flourishing of Adivasi social movements in India during the late twentieth century can be seen to follow logically from the fact that Adivasi communities are amongst those most “ground down” (Shah et al. 2017)… Read More »Towards a contextual understanding of the politicization of Adivasi identity

The documentary: Set among the Rathava and Bhil adivasi communities of western India, Broken Gods documents the social impact of Hindu religious evangelism among India’s adivasi groups. As adivasi communities join Hindu religious sects, their old gods… Read More »Film screening: Broken Gods

I propose a twofold presentation. The first and main part traces the story of the recognition of adivasi expressions as ‘art’, from the colonial collections of ‘primitive bronzes’ in the XIXth century to the claim… Read More »Adivasi art: from “primitive” to contemporary

This lecture focuses on the politics of Adivasi mobilization in western India – more specifically, in the Bhil heartland of western Madhya Pradesh. Drawing on my 2018 book Adivasis and the State, I will present… Read More »Making insurgent citizenship in India’s Bhil heartland

Taking cue from James Clifford’s notion of ”routes” as involving both travel and dwelling, I will concentrate on two recent and contradictory phenomenon in Northeast India; 1) the outmigration of indigenous youths and, 2) the… Read More »Indigenous routes: migration and food sovereignty in northeast India

This paper highlights the importance of exploring what can be termed as emic understandings of anthropogenic change and of local thresholds (ecological tipping points) in History by mapping environmental change in Eastern India in the… Read More »Introductory Lecture
What the Adivasis of eastern India can tell us about the global environmental crises

“Adivasi writing may sound a contradiction in terms, as the literary traditions of Adivasis have largely been oral. Yet, in contemporary India, Adivasis are writing not only in their local languages, but also in the… Read More »Roundtable
Contemporary Adivasi writing in India: paradigms, issues and perspectives

Looking at several tribal communities and situations in more detail: i. Verrier Elwin laid a wonderful if idiosyncratic groundwork for understanding central Indian tribes anthropologically. The Baiga (1939) is a detailed groundbreaking ethnography of shifting… Read More »Understanding tribal social structure and knowledge systems