Ghosh - Between Local Flows & Global Dams

Between Global Flows and Local Dams:Indigenousness, Locality, and the

Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, IndiaKaushik Ghosh

University of Texas, Austin

Not long ago, Arjun Appadurai stressed that “we need to think ourselves beyondthe nation” (1996:158). His reason for this postnationalism was not only evidenceof the unprecedented transnationalization of people and the mass media but also hispolitical charge that the nation-state increasingly constrains the lives of local sub-jects who reside in its territory. Such subjects are forced to occupy neighborhoodsthat are produced by the nation-state as its own context rather than being “context-generating” themselves. Thus, referring to the Brazilian state’s brutalization of theYanomami, Appadurai writes,

The Yanomami are being steadily localized, in the sense of enclaved, exploited, perhapseven cleansed in the context of the Brazilian polity. Thus, while they are still in a posi-tion to generate contexts as they produce and reproduce their own neighborhoods, theyare increasingly prisoners in the context-producing activities of the nation-state, whichmakes their own efforts to produce locality seem feeble, even doomed. [1996:186]

According to this logic, then, the way out of such a confinement in the nationwould obviously lie in the increasing transnationalization of the locality broughtabout by mass-mediated discourses and practices, including the discourse of humanrights, that tend to “destabilize” the nation-state. For indigenous subjects like theYanomami, the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) has in factbecome one such transnational space, producing new postnational “contexts,” andhence “neighborhoods,” a phenomenon that has been called a case of indigenous“place making” in the literature (Muehlebach 2001). I have no doubt that theWGIP is a transnational locality. I would also agree that it destabilizes certain“national” contexts of indigenousness. However, in this article I point out thatsuch destabilizations may or may not help indigenous people in their specificstruggles in relation to the nation-state and the various forms of capital that maycirculate through it today.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 4, pp. 501–534, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360.C! 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissionswebsite, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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Through an ethnographic narration of how the WGIP, as just such a transna-tional locality, meets up with a specific 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 transnational-ism introduces “a politics of place” that undermines the struggles through whichindigenous people have historically attempted—and to some extent significantlysucceeded—to wrest certain autonomies within the formal dominion of modernstates. These struggles—mostly connected to rights to land—have a long historythat 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 tocirculate outside the contemporary transnational discourse of “indigeneity.” In re-lation to these struggles, this transnational discourse is marked by an awkwardnessof fit and a reconfiguration of the political process that ends up excluding the vastnumbers of the indigenous who are engaged in struggles against neoliberal projectsthat threaten them with displacement. More alarmingly, although it makes thesetraditions of struggle invisible, this new transnational discourse of indigeneity haseffected the production of a nucleus of new political leaders who no longer needto be involved with the everyday struggles of land and territory but are continually“encouraged” to perform and fit the paradigms of a transnational “indigenous”subjectivity that has little resonance in the localities occupied by such populationsin India. Consequently, the numerous indigenous struggles within the nation-stateof India have failed to find a larger national leadership, and newly formed “indige-nous” states are being run by political parties and formations that have historicallybeen populated by upper-caste Hindu groups, which are the principal source ofexploitation of the indigenous peoples in India.1 At a time when the displacementof indigenous populations has gained new intensity under neoliberal state poli-cies in India, the “transnationalized” leadership is conspicuous by their absence inthe multiple sites of resistance to these new forms of displacement that mark thenational map.

The specific instance that I explore here is the case of the Koel-Karo move-ment in the state of Jharkhand in eastern India. It is a 30-year-old movement ofMunda, Oraon, and other tribal (adivasi) villagers against the construction of twolarge 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 re-ceived little media attention. Nonetheless, it is one of the rare examples of thesuccessful prevention of the construction of massive dams on indigenous lands inIndia in a long and rich history of determined struggles in India by tribal peoplesagainst forces of displacement. Today, as a transnational discourse “recognizes”these tribal populations as “indigenous,” it has attracted significant participationby a group of elite adivasi leaders from Jharkhand and elsewhere in India. Theparticipation of this elite has affected its understanding of adivasi culture and in-digeneity 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 totransnational forums. I argue that these local contexts can tell us much about thedangers of deploying a transnational discourse of indigeneity without attendingto the nature of its specific translations in specific sites. If such struggles haveemerged from a historical negotiation by adivasi groups of the modern state andcolonial governmentality, then we must pay close attention to how this historyarticulates 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 How-ever, tribal populations, who are the objects of transnational indigeneity discoursetoday, have a long history of living other histories of governmentality in relation tothe modern state, both colonial and national. The forms of “recognition” that weredeployed in that long duree of governmental power were forged in the intersticesof tribal resistance and state technologies of governance as a form of domination(Banerjee 2000; Ghosh 1999; Mamdani 1996). The constitutional, legal, and gov-ernmental rationalities of a nation-state such as India contain a variety of suchgrids of “recognition” in relation to adivasis. These need to be also looked at as ahistorical map of adivasi contestation of governmentality.5 Such a history has ren-dered the project of nation-state governance of such populations particularly opento counterrepresentations and resistance in the form of numerous and frequentpopular adivasi movements like the Koel-Karo.

In this article, through a brief reading of the Koel-Karo movement, I developan analysis of how spaces of adivasi contestation emerge as unanticipated effects ofthe governmental rationalities of the nation-state. Through such a demonstration,I challenge the implicit dichotomy of the coercive nation-state and a liberatingtransnationalism that seem to inform the contemporary discourse of indigeneity inboth the academy and the larger space of transnational activism, NGOs, and liberalinstitutions. Specifically, I point to the problem of how the transnational discourseof indigeneity has insufficiently grasped the openings that such populations havecreated in the folds of domination by the nation-state, and in fact it unwittinglythreatens to undermine such openings by producing a different form of indigenoussubjectivity that marginalizes the vast majority of the indigenous populations incountries such as India.6

In the next section, I introduce a brief sketch of adivasi struggles in Jharkhandin connection to the history of Indian modernity. These struggles have a rich 200-year-old history, which cannot be grasped by trying to equate adivasi struggles tothe configurations of a transnational indigenous subjectivity. Moreover, I suggestthat adivasi subjectivity has an ambiguous location in national modernity in India,being both inside and outside the temporality of the Indian state, which allowsus to understand local adivasi political consciousness as being both tied to thediscursive contours of the Indian nation-state while not being fully containedwithin 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 relationto the history of governmentality in India. Having thus framed the space of adivasipolitics “within the nation,” I then proceed, in the subsequent two sections, toprovide a contrasting account of how transnational discourses of indigeneity affectthe imagination of adivasi identity through the example of one of the prime leadersof the Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ICITP). In this context, Ipoint to the enormous divergence in the understanding and deployment of notionsof indigeneity by subjects who are differently located in relation to the transnationalindigenous forum, in both its discursive and institutional manifestations. I alsodemonstrate how movements like Koel-Karo cannot be grasped from within thespace 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 severelylimits the creativity of adivasi politics. A small example follows to illustrate thefluidity and dynamism of an older adivasi discourse in Jharkhand, prior to and out-side the transnational. The article concludes with a discussion of governmentalityas a mode of power as seen through the example of indigeneity in Jharkhand thathas been presented here. I point to certain problems in contemporary discussionsof governmentality in academic writings and suggest that we need to be attentiveto a heterogeneity in the processes of governmentality to prevent us from turningit into a form of all-encompassing, omniscient, and omnipresent knowledge. I endwith an epilogue, which is again an invitation to think of other possibilities ofradical knowledge and politics of indigeneity/“adivasiness” beyond the severelylimited domain of a UN-based transnational imaginary of “indigenous people.”

Indigeneity and Indian Modernity

When it comes to indigeneity and indigenous resistance, our imaginationhas been deeply influenced by a binary around the nation-state. Within the bor-ders and the time of the nation-state, indigeneity is marked by exploitation andimmense coercion. However, beyond the nation-state—or in the time-space ofthe “transnational”—indigeneity arrives as the time of resistance and rights, self-determination and sovereignty. Implicitly assumed in most discussions of indi-geneity today, this binary has the effect of making invisible the histories of thestruggles of tribal populations in the interstices of the discourses of state and citi-zenship, prior to their “recognition” in the transnational imaginary of indigeneity.Tania Li’s otherwise thorough disassembling of indigeneity in Indonesia, for ex-ample, still tacitly traces a history that locates the origins of the struggles of suchpopulations in the temporality of the transnational “discourse on indigenous people[that] took hold in activist circles in the final years of Suharto’s rule” (2000:149).Thus indigenous struggles are narrated today as an assemblage of the prior contextof nation-state policies and coercions and the operation of a transnational indigene-ity movement that is locally translated and deployed by activists and indigenous


people against the oppressions of that prior context. The historical struggles bythe indigenous within the nation-state (i.e., before the time of the discourse of“indigenous people”) become “invisible,” and thus their impress on the processesof the contemporary cannot be recognized.

In terms of the transnational indigeneity discourse, India has the second-largest “indigenous” population in the world. As is the case with the Indonesianstate, the Indian state does not recognize the “legitimacy” of using the term indige-nous people for its tribal populations. However, unlike the Indonesian state, it hasa long history of affirmative action and administrative and territorial recognitionin relation to such populations. These forms of recognition have both colonial andpostcolonial origins precipitated as a result of state efforts to contain a remarkablyrich series of tribal struggles. In fact, the constitutional guarantees promised totribal populations give us an inadvertent map of the history of these struggles.The term adivasi—the most commonly used designation for tribal populations inIndia today—was a neologism produced by Jharkhand’s tribal leaders in the 1930s,signaling the arrival of a new imaginary of a unified tribal identity.

This does not mean that there is no circulation of the transnational discourseof indigeneity among adivasi populations in India. The ICITP, as the organizationthat most prominently represents the case of the indigenous people of India at theWGIP, is overwhelmingly composed of leaders from the Jharkhand state in easternIndia.7 This is not surprising, because Jharkhand, which was granted statehood inNovember 2000 by splitting the existing state of Bihar, had been the site of thelongest (more than 60 years) and best-known movement of adivasi peoples for ter-ritorial autonomy within the state of India (Devalle 1992; Jharakhanda SahayakaSamiti 1988; Prakash 2001).8 In the course of the Jharkhand Movement, a signif-icant middle-class adivasi leadership has emerged, as have a number of politicalparties that define themselves through a discourse of “adivasi identity” (Sachchi-dananda 1979; Singh 2004). From the late 1980s, some of these adivasi leadersand young adivasi activists, who have significant higher education and fluency inEnglish, have aggressively pursued the various international indigenous peoples’forums, especially the WGIP, with the hope of advancing the cause of adivasiautonomy, including the demand for a separate Jharkhand state. The pursuit ofthis new form of politics was particularly made possible with the formation of theICITP and the access to the WGIP that this enabled. The arrival of Indian adivasisat the transnational indigenous forum thus cannot be read as a nascent awakeningof a spirit of resistance. Both the transnational “indigenous people” movement inIndian adivasi history and the more extensive movements for self-determination,such as the one pushing for the establishment of a Jharkhand state, are strandswoven out of a longer, complex, and very active history of adivasi struggles in thecontext of the formation of Indian modernity, both colonial and national.

The demand for autonomy in Jharkhand arose out of the experience of the pre-dictable story of indigenous displacement in the face of development. Jharkhandhas been India’s richest mineral wealth producer from the mid–19th century.


Mining and other projects such as large dams, factories, and forest reserves haveled to the severe territorial and cultural displacement of adivasis and their con-sequent conversion into a cheap labor force under both the colonial and nationalgovernments (Areeparampil 1989; Fernandes and Thukral 1989; Ghosh 1999).While the statehood movement has continued unevenly since 1938, there havebeen other, more localized movements against displacement through development,which emerged particularly from the early 1970s in Jharkhand as they did in otherparts of India, most often in adivasi areas (Baviskar 1995). Of these, the Koel-Karomovement—in the heart of Munda tribal land—is particularly salient for havingstopped any significant land acquisition by the state for the hydroelectric projectin the Koel and Karo river valleys. The project aimed at acquiring 55,000 hectaresof land from a minimum of 112 villages, threatening about 150,000 people, forthe generation of 710 megawatts of electricity (Madhukar 1992).

As with most Jharkhandi local movements against displacement, local adivasipeasant leaders have led the Koel-Karo movement. The one among them who ismost crucial to the movement and central to my account below is Soma Munda,a 60-year-old village headman who is also the elected official 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 JharkhandMovement for statehood. His class and political positionings exclude him frombeing an active part of ICITP. The reasons for this will become clear as we goon. This does not mean, however, that Soma Munda is unconnected to the Indiannation-state or to transnational spaces, although his connections may be differentfrom those of the leaders in the ICITP. Apart from being an elected official ofthe 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 toLumumba’s Congo.

Significantly, a number of new leaders in Jharkhand who have been at theforefront of antidisplacement movements against development projects have hadlong years in the Indian military. This experience gave these new national subjectsa close knowledge of the modern state. At the same time, they also embody anaura of essential tribal Otherness for the state itself. Army recruitment in Jharkhandfrom 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 inwhich adivasis are guaranteed a nominal equality and steady pay. However, adivasirecruits also would often recall the army as a place where “we were respected forbeing especially good soldiers.” As was the case with colonial labor recruitment,army recruitment is also deeply involved with an imaginary of the primitive oth-erness of the adivasi, which is uncontaminated by a weakness of the physiquemarking more “civilized” peoples (Ghosh 1999). This imagination is linked to thedevelopment of a discourse of “martial races” in the military recruitment practicesof 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 verypractices. They are included through discursive practices that also simultaneouslyeffect a necessary exceptionalism. Adivasis are aggressively recruited into the mili-tary, which lies at the heart of the state’s modernity project, but at the same time thisrecruitment 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 againstthe state in another; in fact, the two modes need not be in conflict and may verywell be connected.

This in itself starts problematizing Appadurai’s concept of the “nation” asa “restrictive” context. The nation form produces its populations, such as theadivasis, through certain modalities, but these hardly function as one monolithicembrace that restricts the imagination of its subjects. Adivasi subjects are ambigu-ously located in relation to the nation-state, precisely because of the multiple andfragmented nature of the latter. This contingent nature of the state, produced outof the processes through which it constitutes its populations, is quite unlike theall-encompassing unity that citizen-subjects often assign to it in their imaginingof what the state is. In this sense, the figure of the adivasi repeatedly acts as adeconstructive case in Indian modernity in particular and the metaphysics of thestate in general.

Indigenousness and Two Modes of Governmentality

I propose that the inside/outside problem of adivasi ethnicity indicates twomodes in which the modern state builds on a colonial originary framing of theprimitive in India. Colonial discourse constructed tribal (adivasi) India as an ir-reducible otherness in relation to Hindu India. Tribals were pre-Aryan, and theHindus 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 wasoutside of historical time or at least in the dawn of it. Adivasi rebellions duringthe colonial period often aimed at the Hindu landlords and moneylenders in theirterritories. Colonial administrators and historians explained such rebellions as aresponse to the continuation of an ancient racial order in which tribal non-Aryanswere exploited by Hindu Aryan invaders, without mentioning how the nontriballandlords, moneylenders, and traders of the colonial period were a new populationthat had actually been created and encouraged by the colonial state in its effortto increase revenues and generate a sense of productive ordering of tribal lands(Guha 1983a).12

Having thus constructed this essential primitive otherness of India’s tribes,the colonial state would work on it in two dissimilar ways. One was a process ofgradual assimilation through the rule of law and the market. In so doing, tribalotherness—its relative remoteness from market exchange and private property, for


example—would be recognized, somewhat adjusted to, but with a final teleologyof bringing the adivasi into the time of capital. This process of addressing ethnicitythrough inclusion I will call incorporative governmentality.

The other process of working this alterity was the reverse. Here the essentialpre-Aryan otherness was a signal for the separation of tribal India from the domainof an Aryan–Hindu or Indian mainstream. The argument in this case lingered onthe originary relationship between invaded and invader and the consequent needfor protective justice that it entailed. This approach, of course, completely elidedthe fact that the vast displacement and severe exploitation of tribals under thecolonial state were related to the new modes of colonial land tenure and the newlandlords and moneylenders that these modes of tenure spawned, backed by theforce of the colonial army.

Thus, the numerous tribal revolts against the local landlords in colonialJharkhand would become evidence of an age-old pattern of Hindu–Aryan ex-ploitation of pre-Aryan tribals. The result of such a framing would be protection inthe form of tribal land protections, autonomous areas usually under the paternalistrule of a government commissioner or Christian missionaries. Such modality ofgovernment through “exclusion” from a putative mainstream has variously beentermed as “indirect rule,” “scheduled areas,” or “frontier agency.” In such a processof “protection” through isolation, tribal ethnicity would be considered not easilycompatible with market principles and capitalism (Banerjee 2000). They have tobe ruled according to their customary laws, which then have to be discovered anddocumented. This is where colonial anthropology of course emerged. The moreimportant point for my argument here, however, is that in this second form ofrelating to a foundational tribal otherness or ethnicity, the principle of recognitionis that of exclusion. I will call this exclusive governmentality. It is from within thisdichotomous 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 ofwhich work through the recognition of ethnicity. States, whether they are colonialor postcolonial ones, in the very logic of accomplishing their governmental tasks inrelation to their populations, recognize different subjectivities that do not fully cor-respond to the homogeneous time of the citizen.14 Governmentality and ethnicitythus have a close relationship outside of the “homogeneous time” of citizenship.However, put together, the two faces of colonial governmentality, which continuein the postcolonial nation-state, have complex effects on constructions of tribalethnicity. The reservation of jobs in public institutions, firms, and offices—a formof positive discrimination long extended to tribes and lower castes in India—isthe obvious example of an incorporative governmentality that most typically func-tions through enumeration. The tight fit between identity and enumeration, whichBernard Cohn (1987) was one of the first to point out, is well illustrated by thetypical 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,” thusreferring to the list of ethnicities that the state recognizes as Scheduled Tribes.15

“Enumerated ethnicities” are, thus, the objectified and generic products of the workof the state in recognizing cultural “difference.” As several authors (e.g., Anderson1998; Chatterjee 2004) have pointed out, these ethnic categories are characterizedby a rigid boundedness; they transcend context and are, thus, not “fuzzy”: “Youeither are or are not X.” These are the characteristics that make such ethnicitiesperfect terrain for the growth of nationalism, where identity and time have to be, atleast ideally, homogeneous and perfectly coincidental (Appadurai 1996). Certainadivasi subjects like the adivasi middle class—the exclusive class identity of theICITP leaders—are clearly more exhaustively defined through state enumeration.Such a class, dependent as they are on schooling and urban office employmentas their sole mode of economic survival, is a prime candidate for inhabiting thisempty, taglike version of adivasi ethnicity.16

The adivasi populations that are directly targeted by the exclusive aspects ofgovernmentality in India are largely rural. Unlike the middle-class adivasi popula-tions who do not depend on rural lands or forests in the same immediate sense, thesepopulations are engaged in agriculture and are significantly dependent on theirmultiple uses of forests. Therefore, questions of land and displacement, as in thecase of Koel-Karo, directly affect them, and the legacy and practice of exclusion or“land protection” have a daily relevance. But exclusive governmentality—althougha significant part of the modality of operation of the modern state—always hasto be recessive to incorporative governmentality. The work of modernization andthe rationalization of custom must continue somehow for the modern state. Pro-tected tribes are brought in through institutions of missionary education, throughbanking and financial exchange logic in the form of rural cooperatives, and finallythrough the generation of modern employment, typically in the form of migrantlabor recruitment.17 But for its part, the originary essentialism of tribal differencecontinues to inflect these rationalizations of an incorporative governmentality, asElizabeth Povinelli (2002) has forcefully shown, as a “cunning” of recognition.

However, it also often ends up making available a space for adivasis them-selves to act on their putative irreducible otherness: they can both define themselvesin opposition to the state and a mainstream national community and devise projectsof noncooperation around such an identity. In the following section, I sketch oneinstance of how the practices of exclusive governmentality have come to pro-duce some key spaces within which very lively and intense adivasi protests andmobilizations have taken place in the last few decades in India. The Koel-Karomovement 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 Ranchidistrict 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 provi-sions, clothes, medicines, and bicycles, two market days are scheduled weeklywhen the entire local economy is mobilized. Adivasis, converging on Tapkarafrom a number of villages in the area, sell their produce, forest products, timber,and firewood and buy a range of everyday items brought in by vendors who areconnected to the national and international economy through complex networksof distributors, agents, moneylenders, and wholesalers. However, beyond the eco-nomic transactions, these markets act as a crucial space in which extravillage tribalsociality is produced and reproduced: news of births and deaths is shared, marriageproposals are made, friends and lovers meet, and the mail and money orders sentby migrant family members are picked up from the postman. If the colonial readingof the adivasi was that of a primitive who was not rational enough to grasp theabstraction of money and markets and thus adivasi society needed to be isolatedfrom markets for its own survival, here we see the market in precisely the oppositeguise. It is a crucial node in the reproduction of adivasi kinship and sociality. Italso allows adivasis a space to interact with non-adivasi persons (dikus), especiallytraders, moneylenders, and others who would not necessarily be present in every-day adivasi village life. Such interactions act as contexts within which a certainkind of situated self-abstraction in relation to the larger world is produced.

Kaleshwar Chowdhry is a trader (bania) who lives in Tapkara. I first metKaleshwar one morning at Tapkara market in 1995. I was with Soma Munda, whohad reached Kaleshwar’s shop to sell lac, the resin-like secretion of certain forestinsects used in the making of lacquer and varnish among other things.18 We sat ona bench in front of his spacious, warehouse-like shop; Kaleshwar sat on a mattressbed (gaddi) across from us. To his right were the large and ancient-looking scalesused to weigh the bags of lac brought in intermittently by the villagers. In his fiftiesthen, 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 electedofficial had organized the villagers to have a road built at minimum cost and hadforced the government to provide all the funds. Kaleshwar was exhorting Soma totake this example and convince the people to come together and contribute to suchprojects:

How long do you think our sons—yours and mine—are going to bike around? Theyhave motorbikes today; they’ll get cars tomorrow. Can anyone drive a car on theseroads? Why can’t these people [adivasi villagers] get their senses back and stop protest-ing against the government all the time? Okay, maybe [they] do not want the [Koel-Karo] dam, why not the roads? They just don’t know what’s good for this place. Justimagine if there was a proper drivable road from Tapkara to Lohajimi.

Lohajimi is Soma’s village and the planned site of the main dam of the Koel-Karoproject. 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 five kilometersfrom Lohajimi]. But it couldn’t be the NHPC [National Hydro Power Corporation, thestate corporation in charge of the Koel-Karo project] who could do that. NHPC has togo. Let the Public Works Department build it; let them entrust our village council withthe job. The government insists it has to be the NHPC.

Kaleshwar now became less guarded. He had been trying to restrain himselffrom condemning the antidam sentiments of the people. But now he began a moredirect attack: “They will get so much more money than I or other traders would.Why can’t they understand that it is to their benefit to get this dam built here? It’slakhs [hundreds of thousands] of rupees, beyond the farmers’ dreams.”

Again Soma was amused. But he continued politely, “You know how adivasisare,” touching Kaleshwar’s arm in a gesture of feigned solidarity in their mutualknowledge of adivasi low consciousness and backwardness. He said, “You givethem money, and they drink it all up—here, there [latar-patar]; fights, screaming,quarrels—that’s 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 can’t stopbecause of this!” Kaleshwar was visibly irritated now.

“Well you go and convince them, I can’t,” Soma said.“But you are the elected mukhia [panchayat head]; convincing ignorant vil-

lagers is your work.”“Let’s say, then, that I have failed in that work,” Soma said with great resig-

nation but equally great confidence.Later on as we walked out from Kaleshwar’s shop, I was wondering whether

Soma Munda really believes that adivasis know little better than spending all theirmoney in drinking. As we talked about it, Soma revealed that he did think thatadivasis have a problem in handling money and resisting the temptations of drink.I then saw in one glimpse how Soma Munda’s world, his understanding of hispeople and of the adivasi intellectual’s understanding of that world, can never liveoutside the colonial discourse on tribes. Yet there was also that smirk on Soma’sface, and soon he was telling me how he “drinks up profusely whenever NHPCor Land Acquisition officials are reported to be coming.” Whenever he knowsthe powers he is dealing with are much too powerful for a dialogue and for hisvoice to make an impact, he submits fully to that statist symbol of savagery—thedrunk adivasi—to redeem such racism as a weapon in the adivasis’ fight to savethemselves.

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 whatthey know to live on. Money is not for them.” Although Soma articulated thisin a dusty, remote corner of the world, the echoes of this “truth” about primi-tive nature reverberate through much of the colonial archive and are central tothe arguments of Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1990), the mostextensive modern theoretical work on money (see Banerjee 2000). For Simmel,


money is the perfection of all abstractions. By allowing for fundamentally dissim-ilar objects to enter into exchange, money signifies the ability to go beyond theconcrete and the contextual contained in the social life of things. Money is not onlya perfect form of abstraction but also a perfect form of purity, a human possibilitythat is unmarked by the vagaries of space and time. That is why money (and thestate), for Simmel, is the truly universal. In this sense, money is the perfect em-bodiment of civilization and, along with the state, the sign of a universal humanity(Simmel 1990:82) that cannot be eroded or compromised by social conventionsor historical accidents. In fact, Simmel writes that the inability to comprehendmoney in this abstract manner leads to the “primitiveness” of the primitive. In-stead of grasping it as of purely mediatory value, the primitive conceptualizesmoney as a thing in itself. As a means to an object in the future, money leads toprogress. It thereby demonstrates the functioning of the Hegelian Subject who cangrasp the world “objectively” and thus act on it through an exercise of a rationalwill. 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 inwhich money is spent to produce an animal-like and sensual pleasure. Money aspure abstract exchange is “investment” for a deferred and more productive future(the kind that Kaleshwar imagined); money used in the primitive sense of an em-bodiment of immediate needs and desires—such as alcohol and drunkenness—isthe “primitive” form of money or, in effect, the absence of it.

The conversation between Kaleshwar Choudhury and Soma Munda expressesprecisely this colonial common sense about tribes and Simmel’s logic of money andthe primitive. Although Kaleshwar did not imply that the Munda adivasi farmers areprimitives in Simmel’s 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 casteboundaries. Kaleshwar was not about to suggest this while trying to convinceSoma Munda that the adivasis should accept monetary compensation for theirland from the Koel-Karo project. Soma, on the other hand, returned precisely tothis argument to indirectly argue for the impossibility of land acquisition basedon monetary compensation and hence the improbability of achieving an adivasiconsensus in favor of building the dam.

What started as a racist logic in a system of exclusive governmentality pre-scribed for tribal regions of colonial India has come to produce a mode of resistancethat the modern state had hardly bargained for! However, this essentialized, nega-tive identity centers on the adivasi inability to grasp that the universality of moneyand modernity have had an important role to play not only in colonial paternalistprotection or in Soma Munda’s deployments but also in nation-state governanceitself. In 1998, the Supreme Court of India passed a judgment whereby all de-velopment projects that threaten to displace adivasi populations must work witha land-for-land rehabilitation plan as opposed to rehabilitation through monetarycompensation.19 Today, this has become standard for all projects displacing adi-vasis; rehabilitation cannot be done in the form of monetary compensation but


only through land-for-land exchanges. Yet this policy is not very practicable ina country as densely populated as India. Legally, at least, it is quite complicatedto accomplish, and as a result there is increasing pressure from bureaucrats andindustrialists to override this landmark judgment.20

What began as an act of exclusive governmentality—the recognition of thenegative and separate nature of tribal/adivasi identity—became an aporia in theproject of incorporative governmentality. To incorporate the subjects of alterity, tomake them continuous with the time of the modern, the state now has to includethis alterity as a conceptual basis of its actions. In the process, the very contextof the nation-state—its legality and governmental projects—is fundamentally re-drawn. Even more important, this reveals that the functioning of this “exclusive”principle of governmentality may at times interrupt the hegemony of the state andits projects of governance. If the original object of an exclusive governmentality, inthe case of adivasis, was the prevention of revolts and other acts that challenge thelegitimacy and the functioning of the state, in its reproduction by Soma Munda inthe context of the Koel-Karo movement or “revolt,” we have the inadvertent resultof the subversion of the project of development of the contemporary state. Notall situations would produce such subversion, but its very possibility, not to men-tion its actual materialization in different sites, becomes intrinsic to the process ofgovernmentality and the career of the state.

To speak of indigeneity in the Indian context, then, is to speak of a complexinterwoven history of adivasi movements and exclusive governmentality. Togetherthey compose an unstable discursive terrain within the history of national moder-nity in India. Persons like Soma Munda or new “rebellions” like the Koel-Karomovement are at the heart of a distinctly dynamic indigenous political world thatholds much promise with regard to the possibilities of a politics of indigeneity. Suchworlds are not receding residues of an original, authentic “indigeneity.” Rather,they are the products of a long struggle between governmentality, as a colonialand national mode of power, and adivasi populations. The latter are deeply markedby this struggle but as they inhabit and deploy this power they also rework it toproduce 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 alsothe lack of planning. Hence they have no ability to invest and no ability to handlemoney properly. PSM,21 one of the founders and ex-president of the ICITP, oncelamented this while supporting the technology of big dams. At a seminar organizedon the Koel-Karo project by anti-dam activists, he said, “We need big dams; howelse does any country get electricity? The problem with us adivasis is that we don’tknow planning. To live in the modern world you need to have minute-by-minuteplanning. Dams are not a problem, if we adivasis have our own state and if we canplan.” PSM is of course part of a middle-class adivasi leadership that emerged out


of the opportunities made available through job reservation or affirmative actionpolicies. Such a leadership was deeply involved in the demand for a Jharkhandstate in the 1980s and 1990s. Their vision of ethnicity and its connection to thefuture state was also much closer to the enumerated ethnicity that is the effect ofincorporative governmentality. PSM’s vision of a Jharkhand state revolved aroundthe preservation and nurturing of various “tribal cultural essences” built around thetheme of “harmony and equality,” the supposed opposite of the caste principles ofmainstream 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 one’s ethnicity in the form of the modernstate, which would run on the basis of modern planning, the pamphlet betrays themode in which a middle-class Jharkhandi leadership finally has to collapse theproblem of difference into the empty national time of statehood.

Within such a state, PSM once said to an audience in the United States, “propercultural traditions will be preserved and improved. For example, if the dance flooris gone in a tribal village, so is the village. It is as good as dead. We must preserveand improve the dance arena in all villages; training can be provided to teachvillagers the proper dance and musical traditions.” So dance and village life are atthe core of adivasi Jharkhandi identity, but these need to be identified, preserved,and objectified and then reformed to make them up-to-date and allow them toshine. PSM’s specific training in linguistics at a university in the United Stateshas spread into his translations of Munda oral poetry, which are done according torigorous classificatory methods of linguistics, informed by his numerous Mundarigrammar books and shaped by his attempts at the strict formalization of culturalidioms. One of his favorite projects has been to try and create a codified andformalized grammar of Jharkhandi dance and music in terms of the quintessentialtribal village. For adivasi leaders, territorial sovereignty is imagined in the formof a modern state, and their political engagement has primarily taken the formof mobilizing demand for such. PSM’s cultural nationalism, however, makes thematter of culture the exclusive domain of expert knowledge. Cultural activity thenawaits 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 formsas a matter of expert knowledge, local, on-the-ground struggles to protect tribal landby tribal villagers become peripheral and even antagonistic to the understandingof the “political” of a middle-class adivasi leadership. As long as these leadersparticipated in the electoral process, certain solidarities with “locals” could bedisplayed, but this had no bearing ultimately on the modality of their politicaldiscourse, which was exclusively focused on getting statehood.

As nationalism’s histories have taught us too well, demand for statehoodhas to ultimately work through the production of hegemonies in relation to themasses who can then be led toward the empty homogeneous time of the nation-state (Chatterjee 1986). This would need an entire set of negotiations with varioussectors of the population. The most elite of Jharkhand’s leaders—in the confidence


of knowing Jharkhand as a homogeneous, objective, enumerated ethnicity availablefor the shaping of expert knowledge—had moved far away from the project ofproducing such a nationalist Jharkhandi hegemony.

By the 1990s, the so-called mainstream Indian parties had accepted the im-portance of the demand for a separate Jharkhand state, especially in the contextof the increasing integration of the Indian economy into global markets and con-sequently the significance of Jharkhand’s mineral and industrial wealth. This wasparticularly true of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The irony isthat the Hindu nationalist movement has its origins among the traders (like Kalesh-war), moneylenders, and other petty bourgeois classes who are the most direct andvisible exploiters of adivasis and against whom the latter have often mobilized.22

However, through organizing and building on the actual projects of governmental-ity or development—schools, small-scale development projects, youth programs,employment—the powerful Hindu nationalist movement started to win electionsin Jharkhand from the early 1990s, while Jharkhandi leaders like PSM remainedstuck with their imagination of a completed project of Jharkhandi culture that onlyawaited the gaining of statehood.

Jharkhand was formed in 2000, initially through a formal legislative billbrought forward by the federal government, which was dominated by the Hindunationalists who had made the issue of granting statehood to Jharkhand a part oftheir national election campaigns. The subsequent elections were overwhelminglywon by the Hindu nationalist coalition, and they formed the first state government inNovember 2000. Since its formation, Jharkhand has been ruled by the BJP, althoughit has had token adivasi chief ministers drawn from the ranks of rural adivasi youthwho had been recruited and trained by Hindu supremacist organizations for overthree decades. Within the first two weeks of the formation of the new government,it declared that building the Koel-Karo dam and the need to control militarily agrowing Maoist guerilla movement in large parts of rural Jharkhand were the firstpriorities of the state. Over the next few months the rural police were rearmed andput on high alert. Bunkerlike structures were built at police stations and outposts(Balagopalan et al. 2001). On February 1, 2001, the police opened fire on villagersdemonstrating in the Tapkara market against an instance of police brutality andkilled eight people not very far from Kaleshwar’s shop (Balagopalan et al. 2001;Bhatia 2001). This was the first instance of such violence in the 25-year-old Koel-Karo movement. Following this incident, PSM and other middle-class leaders ofthe Jharkhandi political parties—who had been devoid of a formal political rolein Jharkhand since the state was formed—made some perfunctory visits. Whetherthrough the ICITP or any other organizations, they did not organize support for theterrorized populations in the Karo area; nor did they agitate against the killings innational or transnational forums.

I return later to the fate of the Koel-Karo project, but here I want to linger on themiddle-class adivasi leadership as the products of an enumerated ethnicity enabledby incorporative governmentality. By the late 1980s, this middle-class leadership


had formed ICITP, and by the middle of the UN’s Decade of Indigenous People(the 1990s), they found in Geneva an alternate space of political potency. In thisfurther removal from the nitty-gritty, on-the-ground realities of Jharkhand, sucha leadership had even less space for struggles such as Koel-Karo. Being adivasihad taken on other meanings that were performed for other audiences and in otherspaces. The consequences of such a remove can be traced through a conversationthat I was part of in 1996 between Soma Munda and PSM.

Ethnicity and Its Fantastic Locations: Of Switzerland, Tapkara, and OtherTribal Places

We sat in a tea shop in Tapkara, close to where the police firing claimed eightlives five years later in 2001. Back in 1996, we were meeting against the backdropof fresh initiatives by the Indian state to relaunch the Koel-Karo project.

PSM: Somaji, I heard that you’ve again got land acquisition notice from thegovernment?

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 Court’s decision that takes Bonai and Koche [two villages in theKaro area] as model villages and let the government rehabilitate them. Acomprehensive rehabilitation has to be done; the Court’s ruling includesthe question of proper land, culture, sacred groves, and temples [sarnamandir] as part of rehabilitation.

Kaushik Ghosh: Do you think we should really be going by the Court’s ruling? Where atleast 110 villages are to be fully drowned, don’t you think it is dangerousto work with only two villages as a model? It is not so difficult to provideproper rehabilitation to two villages. But just on that basis they can startthe 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 andcorruption [here] that I do not think they will be able to rehabilitate thepeople of Bonai and Koche and start the construction.

SM: No, it is not easy. Rehabilitation has to take place in accordance to theChotanagpur Tenancy Act [CNT Act].24 S. C. Roy has written in the act[here Soma mentioned clause and paragraph numbers] that in case ofland acquisition based on the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, rehabili-tation must be done with an eye toward not destroying the community.Thus, members of one patrilineal clan [killi] cannot be resettled in differ-ent places. So, if the government tries to relocate Koche or Bonai, thenthey will be taking members of the Guria clan away from the remainingmembers in the other 50 and more villages. Otherwise, they will haveto 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 ofIndia? We have always said, if the country will develop by sacrificing us,we will sacrifice ourselves, but we cannot do it illegally in opposition tothe CNT Act and the Supreme Court! If the government can resettle uslegally by the dictates of the act, we will move. But we know they cannot,they cannot do this thing legally.


PSM: Somaji, how will a country work if you say such things! In modern timesyou cannot stay put like that.25 It just won’t do. I have a different sugges-tion. Why don’t you let the government rehabilitate Lohajimi [Soma’svillage]. You say there is no land, come on! The government should giveus a piece of the Saranda forest, how much do we want after all! Just cleara piece at the edge of the forest, and if we can ensure it, we can make abeautiful village there, a model village for the whole of Jharkhand.

SM: That’s a good idea, but the work has to be done legally, by the Court’sorder. It is not possible to break the killi, otherwise you are very right.

PSM (clearly irritated): No, you don’t seem to understand my point. Jharkhandcan become a great place; our people can live in much better villages;we need to build well-planned villages. I have seen beautiful villages inSwitzerland on the sides of mountains. We can have villages like those,absolutely beautiful, prosperous! It’s very peaceful, those villages.

SM: Yeah, you are probably quite right. I agree with you, but the CNT Act isthe problem; killis cannot be separated, unless one amends the CNT Actin the Parliament. After that even Lohajimi’s rehabilitation is possible.

Our strange and almost surreal conversation ended soon after this, with PSMleaving in his car and Soma and I turning back toward the newly resignified villageof Lohajimi. We started climbing a slight hill along the red laterite road, very typicalof Jharkhand. The late afternoon sun hung low on the horizon, a horizon lined withthe silhouettes of a semiarid tropical vegetation; I looked around—local date palms;the knobby, hardy sal trees; mahua, the flower of which makes the delicious drinkof Central India; baer trees, known also as kul; muruhbah or palash; putush, akind of shrub; bamboo—it was hard to imagine alpine pines here. I kept turningover the entire conversation in my mind. Switzerland—standing in for Europe andProgress here—seems to always enter my life in a predictable form: it embodiesa desire of the bourgeois subjects of marginalized modernities to have a heady,heavenly concoction of innocence and modern development—unspoiled nature,white as the alpine snow; yet it oozes with the wealth and luxuries of modernity, awealth that seems to leave no scratches on the surface of the earth. Later I wouldread Michael Taussig’s (1995) recollection of a mythic Switzerland in the faraway,marginal modernity of his Australian childhood in the 1950s: the intense, body-shuddering ecstatic opening of packages of Swiss butter sent by a grandmother wholived in Switzerland, the butter encompassing all that was excessively innocent andwealthy about a modernity that had eluded them in Australia.

Now I desperately asked Soma, “Did you make any sense of that, what theyhad come for? It worries me.” To this Soma responded,

Don’t worry so much, these people always come like this—by car, suddenly. I knowvery 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.” Theywanted to give leadership to the Koel-Karo movement. I kept saying, “Yes, yes.” I saidif they give us support we will gain in strength, but we should lead our movementourselves; if they want they can definitely give us support like the way we give to theJharkhand movement, a little from the outside. When these folks come, I just keepagreeing, “Yes, yes,” “You are right,” and soon they depart and leave us alone; therewill 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 evenmanage 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 futureJharkhand, I noticed that Soma Munda did not react at all to this point. I, on mypart, had recognized in PSM’s statement the continuation of a commonplace Indianbourgeois dream of Switzerland as the sign of a fantastic modernity. I still do notknow what Soma thought then, but I suspect that his silence signified the impos-sible distance that has been emerging between middle-class adivasi leaders likePSM and Jharkhand’s subaltern classes. Switzerland, which seemed so close andplausible for the former, could barely evoke any meanings for Soma. This distancebetween two classes of adivasi leaders in Jharkhand points to a difference in the wayadivasi identity and the very nature of the “political” are articulated among them.Here Switzerland embodies the location—both literally and metonymically—ofthe form of politics and cultural imagination that has come to inform leaders likePSM. It seems to spell out the radically different dreams that propel the elite andsubaltern leaders of Jharkhand’s adivasis today.

ICITP: Transforming the Adivasi into the Indigenous

PSM was president of the ICITP at the time of the meeting in Tapkara de-scribed above. ICITP’s exclusive focus is the WGIP located at the United Nationsin Geneva, Switzerland. From 1987, ICITP has been demanding at the WGIP thatthe Indian state recognize the presence of indigenous peoples in India and theirright to self-determination. The Indian state has characteristically responded thatno scholar can “say with any degree of certainty that the scheduled tribes in Indiaare 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 Indiatoday are the descendants of the conquered or the conquerors” (ICITP 1989:8).The Indian government, on the other hand, recognizes the marginalization of lowercastes and tribes in the paternalistic language of “backwardness” and “weakness”and accordingly holds out the constitutionally framed offers of educational and jobreservations. Consequently, the status of all such groups, including that of tribes,becomes that of cultural minorities. As cultural minorities alone, however, it is dif-ficult to gain from the principles of the UN Working Group, because the identityof “indigenous” is of paramount importance there: “The term Indigenous peoplerefers to populations living in countries which have a population composed ofdiffering ethnic and racial groups, who are descendants of the earliest populationliving in an area and who do not as a group control the national government of thecountries within which they live” (WGIP 1983).

As is well known, the specific histories of conquest in the Americas andAustralia make such definitions fairly workable but, arguably, make the case morecomplicated 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 asan NGO with consultant status in the United Nations. Lokayan wrote: “What is ofcrucial importance is not the fact that a group of communities might be the onlyoriginal settlers of the region or part of the original inhabitants of the area but the factthat the processes of colonization or colonial policies affected in a significant andcultural manner the economies and the cultures of groups of populations” (ICITP1989:9). The effect on tribal populations has been especially deep, which the Indianstate itself recognizes but tries to manage only through “positive discrimination.”Lokayan argues, however, that “the policy of discriminatory protection was onlyavailable to a few (who could access it); they (the protected) became part ofthe mainstream economically, culturally and often times [became] mediators inthe discourse between the mainstream and the large masses of the tribals whoselives remained untouched by the policies.” Lokayan then adds, “It is obviousfrom our report that the Scheduled Tribes are reduced to a colonial situation andare dominated by a system of values and institutions maintained by the rulinggroups of the country” (ICITP 1989:9). So, in the spirit of the resolution of theWGIP, the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes in India should be recognizedas indigenous peoples.

ICITP, however, persistently claims indigenous status based on origins andcontinuity. It is an effort to meet the WGIP resolution to the word. Through out the1990s Decade of Indigenous Peoples, ICITP organized several conferences aroundthe theme “Who Are the Indigenous People of India,” but this quite predictablyproved to be a murky issue that is not quite amenable to rigorous scholarship. WhileICITP fights the Indian state in terms of a global discourse of indigenousness, ithas been variously allied to several NGOs in Europe such as the Society for Threat-ened Peoples (STP), headquartered in Gottingen. The discourse of indigenousness,which such NGOs are deeply committed to, is one of an authentic indigenous cul-ture, innocent and pure, that must be saved and liberated from exploitation by thevarious nation-states.

Indigenousness: A Global Ethnoscape

The operation of the imagination of indigenous people through the mecha-nisms of the United Nations and associated NGOs could be called the operationof a “global ethnoscape,” in the sense that Appadurai uses it. It is also a “post-national global order” where “familiar anthropological objects” have apparentlybeen displaced.

In Appadurai’s terms, the WGIP and ICITP’s practices would imply that whatit means to be tribal today can no longer be understood in terms of the local contextand particular places. Rather, we have to look at how a global, deterritorializedimagination of indigenousness invokes and signifies new effects of locality. Yet onestill has to subject this apparently descriptive project to serious critique and ethicalquery. I still need to ask, “If this is so, how do we evaluate this moment? What isour 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 thisglobal ethnoscape, which turns on a certain affect: a neoprimitivist discourse ofwhich 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 continuationof a much older discourse of primitivism, the invention of a pristine primitivefigure 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 economicreason of globalization, this discourse privileges a metropolitan activist as the solemoral authority in the judgment of third world nation-states in relation to theirindigenous populations. This moral authority is pitched in the name of democracyvia civil society, but its configurations are such that it does not need to engage withthe specific histories and politics of the particular populations involved.

By constructing a pure indigenous subject, this moral authority first invokesthe discourse of cultural rights—another universalism—and then goes on to createa domain of politics where individual states and their metropolitan judges are thesole agents involved in the production of democracy. There are many aspects of thisimagination, including the formation of a new global, multicultural citizen-subjectof late modernity. Is not this subject the European subject, the same one who initi-ated this fantasy of the primitive in the first place? It is so, with an important caveat.As Zizek (1997) writes about the culture of multiculturalism, multiculturalists donot appreciate or depreciate the Other in relation to their own culture. They, infact, disavow the position of being from a “culture,” a disavowal that makes themthe ideological subjects corresponding to the new form of transnational capital: aglobal company that disavows any attachment to any particular nation while turn-ing all nations into the zone of its colonization, including that which we may stillassociate it with. Through this disavowal, multiculturalists can be universal andthus partake equally of any culture that they may want to savor. The ethnoscape ofa global “indigenous people” discourse is a similar zone of multiculturalism, theextreme visibility of the primitive body contrasting with the complete invisibilityof the viewer.

The critical modality of this transnational sphere is of course the attack onthe nation-state. In the case of India, transnational indigenism reinvokes the oldercolonial imagination whereby all questions of exploitation of the tribal can be lo-cated in an original Aryan–aboriginal conflict, located deep in the very foundationsof the entity called India. In this vision, the colonial state was the only guaranteeof protection for the tribal. Amiya Kisku, the first president of ICITP, thus said ina 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 officials and scholars made extensive ethnographic,historical and religious studies. Indology developed as a distinct discipline and thephilosophical, cultural and socio-religious values were spread all over the world. Theytried to look at India’s social and religious customs and practices from a human and


humanitarian point of view. Anthropology as a separate discipline of studies also devel-oped at university levels and castes, tribes, languages in India were widely researched,provision for political treatment of the depressed classes, tribals, backward communi-ties were made for better administration and welfare. Provision for autonomous tribaldistricts were made. Some legislation [was] passed for the protection of [the] lands oftribal people; in Chotanagpur and Santal Parganas, Tenancy Acts were passed to savealienation of tribal lands into the hand of dominant society [Hindu–Aryan groups]. Infact, the Scheduled Castes and Tribes were treated as indigenous people of India bythe British colonial power. [ICITP 1989:13–14]

In addition to the way in which this passage erases the entire history of con-quest, violence, and cultural destruction under British colonialism, it also preparesthe ground for the erasure of the modality of late capitalism. PSM’s own responseto the question of structural adjustment and its potentially very grave consequencesfor Jharkhand bears this same faith in metropolitan “goodness.” At a conferencein the United States in 1995, PSM had commented: “About the entrance of globalcapital, 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 rep-resentatives of ICITP.” At an earlier conference in India, Amiya Kisku stated: “Ifwe 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 havethe most sympathetic charter for the protection of indigenous peoples’ interestsand will be a safeguard against the Indian State” (Kisku 1992). In this operation ofa very different kind of “White Love,” which was generated in colonialism and isbeing reinvented in the contours of the “indigenous people” global ethnoscape, theoperative logic is what Spivak (1988) has called “white men saving brown womenfrom brown men.” Here we can appropriately replace “women” with “indigenouspeople”: “white men (and women) saving indigenous people from brown men.”In this particular love for indigenousness and the corresponding desire economyfor “whiteness” lies the secret of the strange invocation of Switzerland on thatafternoon in that rickety tea shop in Tapkara. The effect of the operation of sucha global ethnoscape, in terms of place and locality, is thus the removal of a cer-tain strand of adivasi leadership from a place-based practice of politics (Escobar2001) and any significant effort to enter into a dialogue with tribal villagers. Theadivasi leadership become literally deterritorialized, not answerable to anyone inany specific site of Jharkhand.

The mode of cultural imagination and the mode of politics in this transnationalpublic sphere complement each other. Although its multicultural vision producesan essentialized, static, and “authentic” picture of adivasi identity, transnational“indigenous people” discourse removes all politics to the exclusive domain oftransnational governance and civil society based on a discourse of abstract humanrights. With such a coupling of culture and politics, the domain of culture getsdelivered to the final rule of law, which can operate in empty homogeneous timeto guarantee the protection of an abstract, noncontextual culture of indigenous-ness. “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 con-fines of law, and “liberal reason” and their sovereignties would finally be broughtwithin the rule of citizenship, human rights, and civil society. Such a discourse oftransnational indigenousness, gaining its power from primitivism and institutionsof the United Nations, seeks out token indigenous persons who are amenable tothis project of global modernity and who can also stand in for the indigenous pop-ulations concerned. PSM and various members of the ICITP are the token figuresof this global discourse.

In fact, through this new transnational domain of UN-based indigenous pol-itics, the tokenized leaders find a new way of remaining in political currencywithout having to address the undemocratic relations that divide them from thelocal adivasi enclaves. If one does not like what a Soma Munda may say aboutdevelopment, the law, or indigeneity or if he is not “conversant” with global fan-tasies and dreams emanating from Switzerland, one can just leave and return to thesafety of the transnational indigenous space. Jharkhandi political society under-goes a further and more serious death in the process; and along with this politicaldemise, the chances of a democratic tribal polity become even more remote. Byinserting the modern essence of indigenousness into the new power of deterrito-rialized “ethnoscapes,” a new globality reinvents a museumized locality that issevered 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“indigenousness”—however complicated on empirical grounds—can always belocated in its wholeness in the past and the future. In contrast, the possibilitiesin that other space of adivasi ethnicity, where a Soma Munda puts together hislocal versions of adivasiness, can be quite unpredictable. This version of ethnicityand belonging is deeply contingent and is much more inventive and flexible. Letme offer an example here. In the course of studying the Koel-Karo movement inthe middle 1990s, I often wondered about the question of the collective. One ofthe remarkable aspects of the movement was the depth of the unity among thevillagers of the Karo valley. How was such a determined collective forged? Thiswas particularly important to ask in light of the fact that although the majorityof villagers were Munda adivasis, a significant number were from other ethnici-ties including non-adivasi ones. This included the Rautia community. Rautias areclassified today by the incorporative developmental state under “Other BackwardCastes,” a state classification for affirmative action purposes that indicates that,although these are not untouchable castes, they are low in the caste hierarchy andhistorically were discriminated against by the upper castes. From the early colo-nial period, however, Rautias used to be the local landlords in several villages ofthe Koel-Karo region, and the Mundas actively remember their exploitation bythem. Although they were landlords, they were small and marginal ones; and after


independence, their situation has been worse than that of many Munda adivasifamilies in these villages. Largely illiterate, the community has not been able todevelop much traffic with the lucrative domains of the modem state, and after thepostindependence de-recognition of landlord ownership, they possess little land.In such a context, it is remarkable that Rautias and the Mundas were so closelyallied against the construction of the Karo dam. I asked Soma about this: “How isit that Rautias and Mundas have managed to remain united against the dam? Afterall, the Rautias were the landlords who forced the Mundas to provide corvee labor[beth-begar]; so many people still remember their family members being forcedto carry the landlord’s palanquin [dola] or working long days without pay on theRautia fields.” Soma responded with a glint in his eyes:

All this was true in the past. But they lost all their land after independence. Theirways have been mended as a result. Now they have become adivasis again. They workon these same fields themselves, just like the Mundas. They produce their lives withtheir own hands from this soil. They do not live like dikus anymore, living off otherpeople’s toils. This land now acknowledges them. And their spirits [bongas], they aremore 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 frame-work of the state, the Rautias would certainly not be adivasis. Nor would theybe so considered by most Jharkhandis, adivasis or otherwise. But within the lo-cal complexities of memory, the Koel-Karo movement, and the rituals of worshipand work, new ethnic configurations become imaginable. Thus, reconstellatingthe category of the adivasi through an entirely different domain of materiality—ofland but of spirits too—Soma, paying little heed to state or ICITP efforts to define“adivasiness” and “non-adivasiness” once and for all, makes possible a differentfuture in this very present.

Conclusion: Governmentality and Indigeneity

My intention behind the critique of the transnational indigeneity discourse inrelation to adivasi political life in Jharkhand is not about the establishment of a gridof authenticity involving an original “local” and a spurious “global.” I have pro-vided an analysis of aspects of the discursive field of the Koel-Karo movement thatclearly emanate out of an older history of colonial governmentality without beingstrictly determined by it. Nor am I making a claim of a necessary impossibility ofalliances between different local and global sites. In fact, I would argue that thereis a great need for such alliances especially today, when, the “developmental state”of the postdecolonization era having been brought within the logic of neoliberalcapital, most subaltern efforts to target the actors behind the various projects ofdisplacement by demanding proper accountability from them are easily frustrated.Especially in this domain of pursuing global corporations and international in-vestors and stockholders behind such projects, transnational activist organizationsare now crucial. Yet it is precisely such alliances and reinforcements that have been


prevented because of the way that the transnational indigeneity discourse has “rec-ognized” adivasi India through the ICITP. A politics of indigeneity that exhaustsitself through the establishment of a pure and essential adivasi identity embodied ina handful of adivasi leaders, who in the process “remove” themselves from crucialstruggles against the displacement of adivasi populations in Jharkhand and India,not only fails to produce those alliances but in fact attenuates these struggles. Itis ironic that the Koel-Karo movement, which is one of those rare instances of asuccessful indigenous struggle against displacement through development, is whatclashes with the indigeneity imaginary unleashed by the transnational indigenousmovement.

Rather than posing a question of the authenticity of ICITP’s leaders, I aminterested in the effects on adivasi populations of the “politics of recognition”embedded in the form of governmentality that is indexed in the transnational in-digeneity movement of the WGIP. My approach to the transnational indigeneitydiscourse follows Tania Li’s general query, “What do these schemes [of improvingthe human condition or governmentality] do? What are their messy, contradic-tory, multilayered, and conjunctural effects?” (2005:384). But in mapping sucheffects, I do not feel we can avoid politically and ethically evaluating them aswell, which Li feels is the kind of weakness witnessed in James Scott’s (1998)question, “Why have certain schemes designed to improve the human conditionfailed?” (Li 2005:384). Failure to evaluate these effects leads to a reading of gov-ernmentality where the differences among various histories of governmentalityare made inconsequential. This happens because of an unexamined need to defineand map governmentality in an omniscient and universal manner. As in the case ofLi, most commentators on governmentality are so focused on demonstrating theadvantages of this formulation of power over older formulations such as JamesScott’s, which posit an outside to power, that we get a scenario where governmen-tality is turned into an all-seeing, omniscient, and omnipresent force that allowsfor no outside to it. Thus practices of governmentality seem to always be one stepahead 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 plottingthe remorseless setting in of the larger logic of bringing all humanity within theliberal discourse of demanding “improvement” and “welfare” from government.In the literature on governmentality, we consistently encounter a purposeful ra-tionality of government that encompasses all initiatives for or against it. Fromthe perspective of indigenous struggles like Koel-Karo, however, we would stillneed a more evaluative and less universalistic framework of governmentality. Ifthe transnational indigeneity movement has failed to reinforce such struggles, thenwhat, instead, has such transnationalism produced, and why? How does this helpus in differentiating among different histories of governmentality in relation to thestruggles of indigenous peoples?

The last question also brings me to the question of agency in our formulationof governmentality. As I have mentioned before, exclusive governmentality in rela-tion 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 thisopposition of land and money has seeped into the legal domain as well as adivasicommon sense, which then reappears as an important point of resistance againstattempts to compensate the displaced through the more easily obtained packageof monetary compensation, the “recognition” of adivasi rights to land was orig-inally produced as a cumulative effect of massive and persistent tribal revoltsagainst the colonial system of 18th-and 19th-century India and Jharkhand. There-fore, projects of governmentality—even if they are definitively marked by liberalnotions of welfare and improvement—are also often determined by the historyof subaltern (nonliberal) revolts. Such a history does not necessarily sit comfort-ably with the needs and compulsions of the regimes of modern governance. Aswe saw with the question of rehabilitation, distant events of adivasi revolts in thecolonial past, through the machinery of governmentality, can produce a presentreality that hardly meets the needs of a neoliberal government obsessed with thebuilding of “infrastructure,” such as hydroelectric projects, to propel India intothe league of “superpowers.” Governmentality, then, in practice is a deeply com-promised game. It contains profoundly contradictory elements, largely becauseof the fragmented imprints of other forms of knowledge, ontologies, and tem-poralities. Unlike recent commentaries on governmentality (e.g., Li 2005), thisdoes not lead to a picture of an all-knowing rationality that just cunningly recog-nizes and redeploys the histories of subaltern resistance without also unravelingitself.

This brings me to the further issue of a tendency in recent literature to positgovernmentality, explicitly or implicitly, as a form of power that precludes coer-cion. In Partha Chatterjee’s Politics of the Governed (2004), coercion and repeatedviolence remain unmentioned as he struggles to lay out a terrain of governmen-tality that seems to always operate through recognition, negotiation, dialogue,mutually agreed-on settlements, and inclusion. Chatterjee’s interest of course liesin establishing the framework of an alternate modernity where the liberal subjectof European modernity is historically unavailable beyond a small section of elites.Governmentality becomes the form of power through which other subjectivitiesand temporalities could be recognized but also included within the modern do-mains of development, planning, and statecraft. In Chatterjee’s narration, theseheterogeneous Others seem to always find their designated slots in the planners’map through a much contested but “negotiated” process. Thus there are extensivediscussions in Politics of the Governed of the displacement and rehabilitation ofpopulations in the course of development, but they are all resolved through “mutualagreement” without coercion or violence. It is particularly ironic to witness thisanalysis of displacement and governmentality, because displacement has become,from the late 1970s, one of the most contested and coercively settled realitiesof development in contemporary India. Adivasi “revolts” or movements againstdisplacement, such as Koel-Karo, have placed the issue of development and dispos-session at the heart of political debates in India today. Most such movements havenot been interested in any negotiated rehabilitations and have only “chosen” to do


so after violent repressions orchestrated by the state and the private corporationsinvolved.26 In fact, if we look at development from the perspective of subalternpopulations, including adivasis, in India, it is much more deeply marked by coer-cion and violence than the negotiated platform that Chatterjee sketches. Coercionand negotiation work hand in hand in the terrain of governmentality, with the for-mer delivering the “target” populations to the domain of the latter. Similarly, TaniaLi writes, “[Governmental] schemes work on and through the practices and desiresof their target populations. They seldom use coercion, aiming instead to reshapethe actions of subjects who retain the freedom to act otherwise” (2005:384; em-phasis added). Like the new Indonesian regime’s efforts to formally distance itselffrom the coercive history of New Order Indonesia while eagerly building on all thepolitical and natural “resources” made available through that history of violenceand dictatorship, Li’s version of governmentality makes invisible the memoriesand contemporary acts of coercion.

This need to keep coercion, violence, and histories of popular “revolts” out-side the theory of governmentality is possibly a result of too eagerly expandingon Foucault’s sense of governmentality as a radically new form of power thatsignaled the end of the absolutist state. Posing the bourgeois subject (of civil so-ciety) as marking the emergence of a form of “disciplinary” power beyond the“repressive,” Foucault developed governmentality and population as concepts thattake us beyond statist or absolutist notions of power built on the dichotomy ofstate and society. However, for Foucault these two kinds of power—disciplinaryand governmental—are really convergent, and they merge together to produce thegeneral entity of biopower that marks modernity (Gordon 1991). Without one, youcannot have the other. Partha Chatterjee’s argument (2004) turns around a critiqueof a normative modernity that is constituted around the disciplinary power embod-ied by the bourgeois individual and the form of contractual collectivity called civilsociety. Such a subject is scarcely available in the colonial and the postcolonialworld, he argues, and he turns instead to governmentality as the domain of powerwhere the scripts of modernity are produced in the postcolonial world. The prob-lem here is the misreading of Foucault’s work as containing two distinct formsof power that can be treated separately. If civil society and the bourgeois subjectare compromised in the colonies and the postcolony, then governmentality andpopulations also need to be treated as similarly incomplete powers and in need ofradical questioning. What are governmentality’s forms in the postcolony? How isit transformed beyond the certainties of liberal principles of government? Withoutattending to these details and detailed translations, we would actually be imposingthe liberal apparatus of governance, which is so centrally placed in the heart oftransnational capitalism today.

Studying the Koel-Karo movement in comparison to the indigeneity of atransnational governmentality allows us to rethink governmentality as a contingent,contested, and fragmented form of power. Whereas the transnational discourse ofindigenous subjectivity can hardly recognize the popular imaginaries of indigeneity


in Jharkhand, the latter cannot be contained within governmental rationalitiesdeveloped by the modern state in India. It also brings to light the need for theethical reading of various strands of governmentality in the interest of the popularstruggles of the indigenous against governmental projects of displacement. Withoutthese moves we are prone to the problem of either uncritically celebrating thetransnational as the moment of liberation for indigenous and other marginalizedpopulations or reproducing an academic malaise of propping up a theory of anall-encompassing governmental power.

Epilogue

Unlike 2001, when the police killed with impunity, 2002 started incrediblywell for Koel-Karo’s villagers. In January, NHPC pulled out, citing the total lackof land acquisition for the project. The Department of Land Acquisition repliedsaying it wished that NHPC officials were the ones in charge of this job, because “togo into those tribal villages is to risk your life. You can be lynched any moment. Nota single of our employees are willing to go there any more” (Kumar 2002). In thecontext of Koel-Karo, where the 28-year-old movement had remained nonviolentand where people had planned to remain so even after the killings, this was morethan a little ironic.

A week after the announcement, I was visiting Lohajimi village on the oc-casion 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 madefor the funeral. Some of us sat on a long bench; others sat scattered on roughlyhewn wooden chairs and palm-leaf mats. One of the men, referring to the news ofNHPC’s departure, said to me, “OK, now you too are free. Now we are safe; ourculture [sanskriti] will be here with us.”

Before I could reply, I felt a stirring next to me. It was Soma. He lookeddown at the ground in the fading light and then began to speak. “Culture is notthat simple,” he said in a soft voice: “I have asked many people about culture—old people, young people; villagers, officers; Mundas, Rautias—no one can sayexactly what it is! What are its qualities?” A rooster ran across the yard, and Somafollowed it with his words:

Does it have a beak like this bird, or does it have lips like us? Does it have a comb onits head, or does it have hair? Is it feathered, or is its skin not covered? Is it steady asa tree, or is it supple like a creeper? Can you cut it into pieces, or is it like water? Canyou find it in a book, in the documents kept in the Commissioner’s Record Room?Even old people can’t tell! Where does it start, where does it end? How old is it? Noone knows. But one thing is certain, it is there!

Notes

Acknowledgments. I thank Ann Anagnost, Partha Chatterjee, John Kelly, and seminaraudiences at the Universities of Chicago, Oregon, and Texas (Austin) for their commentsand 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 haveincorporated all of them here. The Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Institute forIndian Studies generously funded a part of the research on which this essay is based. Theusual disclaimers apply.

1. Strictly speaking the terminologies indigenous, adivasi, and tribal do not overlapeasily. They roughly mark the transnational, national, and colonial histories through whichindigenous populations have been bound to modernity. Although I have sometimes usedindigenous for adivasi in this article, the troubled relation between the transnational indige-nous discourse and adivasi politics in India have been consciously developed throughoutmy argument.

2. The term adivasi dates back to the 1930s and has its roots in the formation ofthe Adivasi Mahasabha, one of the early organizations that demanded the formation ofa separate tribal state of Jharkhand in eastern India. Jharkhand was formed as a separatestate in 2000, but its adivasi identity has been deeply compromised. Most of the state andmarket institutions are markedly controlled by non-adivasi, upper-caste, or other privilegedgroups that have historically been the most prominent exploiters of adivasi populations. SeeCorbridge 2000, Ganguly 1969, and Sengupta 2003.

3. See David Scott’s (2005) helpful discussion of the concept of colonialgovernmentality.

4. Although Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) does not use the term governmentality for heranalysis of the politics of recognition of the “aboriginal” rights to land and difference inrelation to the Australian state, its legal machinery, and its discourse of multiculturalism,her analysis is one of the finest examples of how contemporary discourses of indigeneityand governmentality reproduce each other.

5. This alternate reading of colonial/national registers of the “tribal” slot might be readas “adivasi” agency, in a spirit similar to Ranajit Guha’s (1983a) methodological suggestionof how to read the signs of subaltern agency in the historical archive.

6. One should note that this critique of the transnational discourse of indigene-ity is different from the two offered most commonly. One of them, most typically em-braced by states in the developing world, argues that indigeneity does not apply to aspecific state or region because there is no universally acceptable definition 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 thatwould only lead to ethnic conflicts and thus undermine the possibility of wider class- orexploitation-based alliances. Karlsson (2003), writing about the issue of transnational indi-geneity discourse with specific reference to India, has called these critiques “substantial” and“political,” respectively.

7. There are newer organizations of Indian indigenous peoples that have emerged inthe last several years, for example, the All-India Coordinating Forum of Adivasi/IndigenousPeoples.

8. Adivasis of Jharkhand and Nagaland have been the most active in tribal strug-gles in India. The former demanded statehood within the Indian constitution and na-tional territory, whereas the latter demanded a separate sovereign nation-state. Not sur-prisingly, the ICITP has been overwhelmingly composed of tribal leaders from these tworegions.

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 percentof the state population. See Census of India 1991.


11. One crucial difference is that Primitivist notions attached to adivasis are moreoriented to the notion of a pure but tractable nature untouched by civilization’s 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 thembeing 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 adivasisubaltern rebellions.

13. Mahmood Mamdani (1996) develops an argument around a similar divide betweentwo forms of governmental subjections, the citizen (common law) and the subject (custom-ary law). However, Mamdani assumes that customary law governance was not applied toland in the colonies till its development in Africa. The tribal areas of India, especiallyJharkhand, or Chotanagpur as it was then called, had this form of governance of land andterritory from 1832 onward about 75 years prior to its application in Africa. Chronologyaside, Mamdani implicitly assigns all agency to the colonial state in the institutionalizationof customary law. This ignores the context of tribal rebellion, which forces the colonial stateto come up with new forms of control, such as customary land laws. With his oppositionbetween citizen (good) and subject (bad), Mamdani fails to grasp that the framework ofcustomary law administration of land is an implicit acknowledgment of a resistant anticolo-nialism 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 customarylaw 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 official state category that is used to decide which ethnic-ities fall within the various domains of India’s affirmative action policies targeting adivasipopulations.

16. Susana Devalle (1992) provides a perfect example of this when she writes of thedecontextualized display of “bow and arrows” that adorn the living room walls of manymiddle-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 withthe modern, multicultural nation-state. In fact, the primitive’s “difference” itself is turnedinto a “value” that is consumed by the multicultural citizen. Is multiculturalism a synthesisthen of the inclusive and exclusive varieties of governmentality?

18. The specific insect is Coccus lacca. Lac continues to have a significant globalmarket, although in many of its other applications (e.g., electrical insulations) it has beenreplaced by synthetic substitutes.

19. There is an extensive activist–policy literature on the question of land-for-landrehabilitation, especially in relation to adivasi populations. See Patwardhan (2000) for afairly representative summary of the arguments.

20. Recent events in relation to the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) on the Narmada Riverin India both confirm this reading and indicate that the Indian state’s legal system as willingto subvert its own laws in the interest of neoliberal capital. Although it is obvious that thereis little suitable land available for those who will be displaced by the SSP, the courts haveallowed the work to continue while asking for all rehabilitation to be completed virtuallyin a month prior to when the monsoon rains set in. Given that dams, once constructed, willflood 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 abbreviatedhere.


22. BJP and the associated organizations of the Hindu nationalist movement (Hin-dutva), such as the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, had been particularly active in the adi-vasi areas, including Jharkhand, from the 1970s, with the intention of countering Maoismand Christianity, both of which have a large presence among adivasi populations. Hindutva’ssupport for the formation of Jharkhand was a mid-1990s phenomenon. Earlier Hindutvarefused to accept the term adivasi (original inhabitants) because it connotes tribals as apopulation that predated the Hindus–Aryans in India. Also, adivasis were earlier frequentlyreferred to by the Hindutva movement as vanavasi (forest dwellers) and vanarasena (armyof apes), in a racial and chauvinistic deployment of a theme from the epic Ramayana. Sim-ilarly, it was not till the mid-1990s that Hindutva accepted the term Jharkhand, because itoriginated in Mughal (Muslim) textual sources and maps. Hindutva had tried to promotethe 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 asenormously corrupt and inefficient, a “basket case” in media speak.

24. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908) is the landmark act that recognizes thecustomary 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 wasplanned (Singh 1983). S. C. Roy, the pioneer of Indian anthropology, a lawyer by trainingand keenly sympathetic to the tribal situation under colonialism, was one of the primarypersons responsible for drafting it.

25. The image of the adivasi or tribal society being sedentary and therefore an obstacleto 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, seeGhosh 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 indigene-ity in the context of adivasi or indigenous peoples’ political struggles in Indiacontrasts two Indian indigenous political movements: the “transnational” imagi-nary of the Indian Council for Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which is the centralorganization representing India’s indigenous peoples at the United Nations, andthe “local” imaginary of the Koel-Karo movement, one of several adivasi move-ments against displacement that mark the Indian political landscape today. Giventhat these transnational and very local imaginaries both work in relation to differ-ent domains of governmentality, I question why a transnational governmentalityinvolving indigenous peoples produces a static and essentialized discourse of in-digeneity that inadvertently undermines local initiatives like Koel-Karo. Ruraladivasi populations redeploy elements of colonial and nation-state governmen-tality forged in relation to them in ways that demonstrate a remarkable flexibilityin the imagination of indigeneity. As the neoliberal regime in India has, with aterrifying intensity, contributed to the displacement of adivasis, the question of


indigeneity as adivasi identity has to address these different histories of govern-mentality, the modalities of the politics they have precipitated, and other waysof articulating “local” adivasi movements with transnational alliances. This ex-amination of indigeneity in India concludes by problematizing some of the waysin which contemporary academic discourse has interpreted “governmentality” inrelation to subaltern movements. [indigeneity, transnationalism, governmentality,India, Koel-Karo]

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Ghosh - Between Local Flows & Global Dams