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  • In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India
  • Amit Prakash
Alpa Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (London: Duke University Press 2010; republished New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2011)

This volume is the product of a long-term ethnographic field research in the newly created state of Jharkhand in India. It is an attempt at understanding how contrasting perspectives about indigeneity, creation of a separate state in Jharkhand and the complex political economy of water, jungle and land, co-exist in the area: “what implications [End Page 250] they may hold for transnational debates on indigenous people, rights, and development; and what the unintended consequences of global indigenous rights activism may have for poor, rural indigenous people of Jharkhand, India.” (8)

Interrogating the discourse of indigeneity, the first chapter offers a critical analysis of this transnational discourse, and the engagement of Jharkhandi activists with this idea. The chapter argues that the “concerns of the poorest rural adivasis [are] often contradicted and subverted [by] those of well-meaning urban-based middle class, as well as those of local rural elites aspiring to rise up the class hierarchy” (11) and that “the local use of global discourses of indigeniety can reinforce a class system that further marginalizes the poorest people.” (12)

Rooting itself in a historically located analysis of the construction and emergence of the category of the tribes/Scheduled Tribes/adivasi, the chapter examines the British and post-colonial policies towards these populations, and sets forth the frame of analysis for the book which demonstrates how the “well-meaning, city-based indigenous rights activists may attempt to reclaim the state for the rural poor, while the rural elites – the descendants of the old landlords – maintain their dominance by intercepting the projects of development and democracy in modern India.” (31–2)

Chapter 2 critically examines the debates centred on the revival of indigenous systems of governance that are being promoted by indigenous rights activists to argue that there may be a conceptual gap between the presumptions of these traditional systems of governance and the bourgeois Western order. The chapter offers a rich ethnographic account of the continuous conflict and negotiation between the secular and sacral through a narrative of complex location of the parha in the socio-economic life of Jharkhand. The author stresses that “the Munda view [of democracy] points to the importance of the notion that indigenous systems of governance are locally significant because they embody an idea of politics which is indivisible from the spiritual realm.” (64) The chapter also stresses that the Munda’s vision of democracy through a sacral polity must be taken as a foundation of an alternative political order.

Chapter 3 analyzes the ‘moral economy’ of the rural elites’ engagement with the state. In doing so the chapter argues that the notions of corruption embedded in the Western premises of the state and civil society activism may be inadequate to examine the process of capture by which the local class hierarchies are reinforced and perpetuated through the mechanisms of participatory development. Poverty, argues the author, must be seen in terms of systematic exclusion and marginalization from the development process. The narrative in this chapter is geared towards describing the process through which the existing rural elite (mainly the sadans) appropriate the state developmental resources to perpetuate their dominance in the area, and in turn, partially explains the differential and frankly, marginal engagement of the Munda adivasis with the state.

Chapter 4 examines the complex relationship that the adivasis have with forests and nature, something that has been instrumentally lionized and essentialized by the activists in Jharkhand. Deconstructing the notion of the eco-savage, this chapter argues that the Mundas’ approach to the environment has always been far more complex tham the activists’ promoted notion of nature-love and a context in which man and nature live together in complete harmony. Further, this complexity of the Mundari view of nature is not easily reducible to being [End Page 251] against the modern notion of forests as a resource for exploitation.

Chapter 5 analyzes another dimension of cultural politics...

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