Adivasis, Migrants and the State in India

Adivasis, Migrants and the State in India
Author: Jagannath Ambagudia
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429649304

This book looks at the contested relationship between Adivasis or the indigenous peoples, migrants and the state in India. It delves into the nature and dynamics of competition and resource conflicts between the Adivasis and the migrants. Drawing on the ground experiences of the Dandakaranya Project – when Bengali migrants from erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were rehabilitated in eastern and central India – the author traces the connection between resource scarcity and the emergence of Naxalite politics in the region in tandem with the key role played by the state. He critically examines the way in which conflicts between these groups emerged and interacted, were shaped and realised through acts and agencies of various kinds, as well as their socio-economic, cultural and political implications. The book explores the contexts and reasons that have led to the dispossession, deprivation and marginalisation of Adivasis. Through rich empirical data, this book presents an in-depth analysis of a contemporary crisis. It will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, South Asian politics, conflict studies, political sociology, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology.

State, Law, and Adivasi

State, Law, and Adivasi
Author: Linkenbach, Antje
Publisher: SAGE Publishing India
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2022-09-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9354795285

This volume presents an overview of the relationship between the state, law, and Adivasis that have experienced a profound political shift due to privatization of natural resources. It discusses the role of the corporates and its impact on livelihoods of the Adivasis in India. For the Indian state, a significant challenge is to establish a new normative framework for indigenous autonomy based on the values of equality and sustainability. This calls for recognition of the right to self-determination and exercise of collective rights of the Adivasis. The chapters in this volume examine: • 'Exclusion' as a useful framework for analyzing the various axes of inequality that affect the Adivasi communities • How state, development, and Adivasi politics play out in entangled ways in the social, political and legal domains • The interplay of and the deep tension between the promise of legal protection and the realities of inadequate implementation.

Nightmarch

Nightmarch
Author: Alpa Shah
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2019-04-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022659033X

Winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize Shortlisted for the New India Foundation Book Prize Anthropologist Alpa Shah found herself in an active platoon of Naxalites—one of the longest-running guerrilla insurgencies in the world. The only woman, and the only person without a weapon, she walked alongside the militants for seven nights across 150 miles of dense, hilly forests in eastern India. Nightmarch is the riveting story of Shah's journey, grounded in her years of living with India’s tribal people, an eye-opening exploration of the movement’s history and future and a powerful contemplation of how disadvantaged people fight back against unjust systems in today’s world. The Naxalites have fought for a communist society for the past fifty years, caught in a conflict that has so far claimed at least forty thousand lives. Yet surprisingly little is known about these fighters in the West. Framed by the Indian state as a deadly terrorist group, the movement is actually made up of Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants, all of whom seek to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades. In Nightmarch, Shah shares some of their gritty untold stories: here we meet a high-caste leader who spent almost thirty years underground, a young Adivasi foot soldier, and an Adivasi youth who defected. Speaking with them and living for years with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah has sought to understand why some of India’s poor have shunned the world’s largest democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society—and asks whether they might be undermining their own aims. By shining a light on this largely ignored corner of the world, Shah raises important questions about the uncaring advance of capitalism and offers a compelling reflection on dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.

Coronasphere

Coronasphere
Author: Chandan Kumar Sharma
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2022-12-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000812049

This book presents a broad overview of the challenges posed by COVID-19 in India and its neighboring countries. It studies the differing responses to COVID-19 infections across South Asia, the variegated impact of the pandemic on its societies, communities and economies, and emerging challenges which require an interdisciplinary understanding and analysis. With a range of case studies from India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka, this book, Analyses the socio-economic impact of the pandemic, including the structural challenges faced by farmers in the agricultural production and migrant workers in the informal sectors; Examines the shifting trends in migration and displacement during the pandemic; Explores the precarity faced by LGBTQ+, transgender, Dalit, tribal, senior citizens, and other marginalized communities during the pandemic; Discusses the gendered impact of the pandemic on women and girls, combining with multiple and intersecting inequalities like race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, age, geographical location, and sexual orientation; Sheds light on the position of health infrastructure and healthcare services across different countries, and the transitions experienced in their education sectors as well, in response to COVID-19. A holistic read on the pandemic, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, medical anthropology, sociology of health, pandemic and health studies, political studies, social anthropology, public policy, and South Asian studies.

Adivasis and the State

Adivasis and the State
Author: Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108496539

This work deciphers how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in India's Bhil heartland. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India.

Migration in South Asia

Migration in South Asia
Author: S. Irudaya Rajan
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2023-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031341945

This open access Regional Reader provides a contemporary look at the emerging challenges and issues facing South Asian migration amidst covid-19 and discusses a framework for a sustainable and cooperative migration from and within the region, which will impact both the economic and regional development of South Asia. The book draws a focus on this area through an interdisciplinary and holistic lens and follows the three broad areas of migration studies in South Asia: Governance and mobility, Family, health and demography, and Forced migration. It thereby covers a number of issues from South Asian countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and the Maldives. This book is a valuable resource for those who want to understand the dynamics of migration from the largest migrant-sending region in the world and one which will determine the shape of global migration patterns in the future.

Tribal Development Report

Tribal Development Report
Author: Mihir Shah
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2022-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000606031

This book sheds light on the status of tribal communities in Central India with respect to livelihoods, agriculture, natural resources, economy, and migration. Written by noted academics, thematic experts, and activists, this first-of-its-kind report by the Bharat Rural Livelihoods Foundation brings together case studies, archival research, and exhaustive data on key facets of the lives of Adivasis, the various programs meant for their development, and the policy and systems challenges, to build a better understanding of the Adivasi predicament. This volume, Provides a broad overview of the contemporary macro-economic situation of Adivasi communities, with a special focus on the challenges of agriculture, land, energy, and water use, especially groundwater; Highlights the need to move into a new paradigm of agro-ecology based, nature-positive farming, and sustainable water use, driven by local institutions; Examines the neglect faced by tribal areas in the development of infrastructure in various dimensions, from irrigation to energy; Shares insights on the invisibility of tribal voices in the policy processes, and how political empowerment will enable socio-economic changes for the Adivasis at grassroot levels; Discusses the Adivasi informal sector and the state of migrant workers, whose plight drew national attention during the recent Covid pandemic. Companion to Tribal Development Report: Human Development and Governance, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of indigenous studies, development studies, and South Asian studies.

The Scheduled Tribes and Their India

The Scheduled Tribes and Their India
Author: Nandini Sundar
Publisher: Oxford in India Readings in So
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780199459711

A people in need of quick modernization and mainstreaming, or a powerful defense against the advancing march of capitalist growth---these are the two most prominent and stereotypical images of Adivasis in contemporary India, and both do grave injustice to the ground realities. The category Scheduled Tribes, which is purely an administrative category, and does not reflect the immense diversity among the 500 different communities of tribals in India, comprising 8.6 per cent of Indias population, has acquired over a period of time, a distinct political and discursive salience. This collection of essays, divided in three parts, brings together a range of predominantly sociological and anthropological but broadly social science writing that reflects on and illuminates the jungle of dilemmas and conflicts that the scheduled tribes face as they navigate their way through everyday life. It highlights the enormity of social, cultural, linguistic, and politico-economic diversity among the so-called Scheduled Tribes in India, and aims to provide an intellectual platform for an engagement between the scheduled tribes and their India, as also to map the state of current sociological/anthropological writing and debate on the scheduled tribes.

In the Shadows of the State

In the Shadows of the State
Author: Alpa Shah
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2010-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822392933

In the Shadows of the State suggests that well-meaning indigenous rights and development claims and interventions may misrepresent and hurt the very people they intend to help. It is a powerful critique based on extensive ethnographic research in Jharkhand, a state in eastern India officially created in 2000. While the realization of an independent Jharkhand was the culmination of many years of local, regional, and transnational activism for the rights of the region’s culturally autonomous indigenous people, Alpa Shah argues that the activism unintentionally further marginalized the region’s poorest people. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in Jharkhand, she follows the everyday lives of some of the poorest villagers as they chase away protected wild elephants, try to cut down the forests they allegedly live in harmony with, maintain a healthy skepticism about the revival of the indigenous governance system, and seek to avoid the initial spread of an armed revolution of Maoist guerrillas who claim to represent them. Juxtaposing these experiences with the accounts of the village elites and the rhetoric of the urban indigenous-rights activists, Shah reveals a class dimension to the indigenous-rights movement, one easily lost in the cultural-based identity politics that the movement produces. In the Shadows of the State brings together ethnographic and theoretical analyses to show that the local use of global discourses of indigeneity often reinforces a class system that harms the poorest people.

Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India

Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India
Author: Knut A. Jacobsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2015-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317403584

A second, revised edition of this title is available at https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Contemporary-India/Jacobsen/p/book/9781032244068 India is the second largest country in the world with regard to population, the world’s largest democracy and by far the largest country in South Asia, and one of the most diverse and pluralistic nations in the world in terms of official languages, cultures, religions and social identities. Indians have for centuries exchanged ideas with other cultures globally and some traditions have been transformed in those transnational and transcultural encounters and become successful innovations with an extraordinary global popularity. India is an emerging global power in terms of economy, but in spite of India’s impressive economic growth over the last decades, some of the most serious problems of Indian society such as poverty, repression of women, inequality both in terms of living conditions and of opportunities such as access to education, employment, and the economic resources of the state persist and do not seem to go away. This Handbook contains chapters by the field’s foremost scholars dealing with fundamental issues in India’s current cultural and social transformation and concentrates on India as it emerged after the economic reforms and the new economic policy of the 1980s and 1990s and as it develops in the twenty-first century. Following an introduction by the editor, the book is divided into five parts: Part I: Foundation Part II: India and the world Part III: Society, class, caste and gender Part IV: Religion and diversity Part V: Cultural change and innovations Exploring the cultural changes and innovations relating a number of contexts in contemporary India, this Handbook is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Indian and South Asian culture, politics and society. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.