Situating Claim-making: Land and Adivasi Assertion in Jharkhand

Abstract

Adivasi assertion of distinction based in the communities’ relationship with land and their surrounding environment has been the subject of much debate within academic writing. Critiquing romantic and essentialising images of adivasi societies, recent literature on adivasi politics, increasingly read within the frame of a politics of indigeneity, has raised questions regarding the nature of mobilisation around such romantic imagery. In this article, I suggest the need to reframe the question we ask of movements that make seemingly romantic claims, by asking how and why such claims take the shape that they do. In asking this question, the article argues for a reading of political claims made within the movement as historically contingent and rooted in the dynamic of the conflict that allows for its emergence. Understanding them as such allows for a renewed understanding of seemingly romantic claims, which instead point to the material and historical complex within which the struggle takes place.