CONTEMPORARY ADIVASI WRITINGS IN INDIA: SHIFTING PARADIGMS


Book Description

This book contains scholarly articles by academicians and activists offering meaningful critiques on various aspects of writings by Adivasis, their way of life, and the reception/implications of these writings based on disciplines such as social psychology, cultural studies, political science, sociology, anthropology and cognitive linguistics. The contributors have put in sincere efforts to explain the critical or historical theory which their articles are couched in. While the first few articles offer critical analyses of writings by Adivasi and non-Adivasi writers, inadequate representation of writings by Adivasi writers and activists in university syllabi across Kerala, issues of publication, reception and the importance of translation, comparative analysis of novels by Adivasi and indigenous writers, ethics of reading Adivasi literature, case study of the writings of an independent researcher of Adivasi history, ecocritical analysis of the poems of a poet largely belonging to the oral tradition, the last two articles are empirical observations of activists, who are actively involved in the cultural sphere of the Adivasis in India and outside, on the need for inter-tribal councils and the importance of orality. The book aims to facilitate academicians, scholars, researchers and students by providing fresh and unexplored critical perspectives on subjects related to contemporary Adivasi writings and culture in India.




Tribal Perspectives in India


Book Description

The present anthology which covers eighteen well-explored articles on tribal perspectives in India, assesses critically the tribal art, culture and literature. It also endeavours to bring into surface issues and challenges faced by Indian tribes in reference to their life and hardships, policies adopted by government for their development and problems in their implementation. The book as a whole tries to meet all crucial aspects of Indian tribes. Hopefully the book would serve to larger section of humanity laying bare many hidden facts related to tribal life and culture.




State, Law, and Adivasi


Book Description

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.




Practices of Digital Humanities in India


Book Description

This book represents examples of innovations in digital humanities (DH) efforts across India while theorizing disparate challenges and its negotiations. It examines DH projects that have spanned private and public efforts, institutionally sanctioned lab-work, and crowd-sourced programmes of public significance and shows how collectively they demonstrate the potential paths of DH in India. The essays in the volume highlight the two fundamental challenges for DH – acts of curation of new scales and the creation of platforms that can assist in the collation and analysis of these digital archives – and changes in learning behaviour. They examine the transformation of the university, and the opening up of new relationships between knowledge and audience in concomitant spaces of scholarship such as libraries, archives, and museums. The volume brings to the fore citizen efforts to document, record, and preserve as well as create new avenues of study and forge networks of scholarship that look very different from those of traditional academia. It also foregrounds the challenges of location and addresses the questions of how DH should be taught in India and how to build digital infrastructures. A go-to guide for DH efforts in India, this book will be an essential text for courses on digital humanities, library and information sciences, and the future of experiential learning.




Being Adivasi


Book Description

The seventh volume in the ambitious Rethinking India series, Being Adivasi: Existence, Entitlements, Exclusion looks at the process of development and how it clashes with the rights of the Adivasis. The volume serves not as an academic exercise but, in addressing the larger readership, as a prelude to the change that will bring to the Adivasis some measure of their rights as citizens of a democratic country. The essays in the volume address the persistent problems faced by the Adivasis and Denotified Tribes, from questions of their distinct identity to land alienation, indebtedness and displacement from ancestral lands. Persistent problems faced by the Adivasis-land alienation, indebtedness, vanishing minor forest products from government forests and displacement from their ancestral lands-led to their impoverishment. The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act and the Forest Land Rights Act (FRA) enacted by the previous governments were decisive steps towards the empowerment of the Adivasis. However, at present, the implementation of these provisions has taken a back seat. This volume of the Rethinking India series presents the views of the Adivasis and the Denotified Communities on the process of development and its clash with their rights.




Indigenist Mobilization


Book Description

In Kerala, political activists with a background in Communism are now instead asserting political demands on the basis of indigenous identity. Why did a notion of indigenous belonging come to replace the discourse of class in subaltern struggles? Indigenist Mobilization answers this question through a detailed ethnographic study of the dynamics between the Communist party and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changing everyday working lives of subaltern groups in Kerala.







Populism and Power


Book Description

This book traces the entire trajectory of the farmers’ movement in Western India, especially Maharashtra, from the 1980s to the present day. It reveals the fundamental contradictions between populism as an ideology and as political power within the democratic state structure. The volume highlights the ideologies of the movement; its emergence in the wake of a perceived agrarian crisis; how it conflates economics and populism; the role of leadership; stages of development from grassroots agitations rooted in civil society to the attempts to create space within structures of democratic politics; the eventual formation of a separate political party and consequent implications. It maps the linkages between populist ideology and mass participation, and their contested successes and failures in the domain of electoral politics. Further, the author underlines the effectiveness of the movement in addressing class and gender equations in the region. Rich in primary archival sources and informed field studies, this book will interest scholars and researchers of agrarian economy, rural sociology, and politics, particularly those concerned with social movements in India.




The Adivasi Question


Book Description

With reference to India.




Shifting Perspectives in Tribal Studies


Book Description

This book brings together multidisciplinarity, desirability and possibility of consilience of borderline studies which are topically diverse and methodologically innovative. It includes contemporary tribal issues within anthropology and other disciplines. In addition, the chapters underline the analytical sophistication, theoretical soundness and empirical grounding in the area of emerging core perspectives in tribal studies. The volume alludes to the emergence of tribal studies as an independent academic discipline of its own rights. It offers the opportunity to consider the entire intellectual enterprise of understanding disciplinary and interdisciplinary dualism, to move beyond interdisciplinarity of the science-humanities divide and to conceptualise a core of theoretical perspectives in tribal studies. The book proves an indispensable reference point for those interested in studying tribes in general and who are engaged in the process of developing tribal studies as a discipline in particular.