Speaker: Dr.Uday Chandra, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religiousand Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany.

Title: Intimate Antagonisms: Adivasis and the State in Rural India.Time: 3.00 pmDate: 5th March 2015 (Thursday)

Venue: Seminar Hall, Department of HSS.

Abstract:It is a commonplace of academic and popular discourses in contemporaryIndia that populations described variously as tribes, scheduled tribes,adivasis, vanvasis, and indigenous peoples are locked in combat with themodern state. Indeed, some even argue that if the state in Indiarepresents the forces of modernity, adivasis represent an amodern,counter-modern or even pre-modern social formation. The media and academiccoverage of the recent Maoist insurgency exemplifies this approach as muchas do historical studies of nineteenth-century rebellions or recentcommentaries on peaceful anti-dam movements.This paper challenges this easy binary between the modern state andadivasi communities. I draw on three years of field and archival researchin and on rural Jharkhand to show how the political trajectories of the "state” and the “tribe” are inextricably intertwined since themid-nineteenth century. Following a brief overview of recent scholarshipon the colonial construction of “tribe” in India and beyond, I focuson two case studies from rural Jharkhand today that illustrate how the “ state” and “tribe” constitute each other. The “state” here isboth an idea and a set of governmental practices just as the “tribe,”too, is an ideological and social formation. My argument is, briefly, thatthe two are isomorphic, and that subaltern resistance, whether violent orpeaceful, is best understood as the negotiation, not negation, of modernstate power. The two case studies focus on gender and intergenerationaldivides within adivasi communities during the ongoing Maoist insurgency inrural Jharkhand, thereby highlighting how these intra-community dividesmirror divisions within the rural state itself. Might the apparentopposition between “state” and “tribe” be characterized as anintimate antagonism?

About the Speaker:Uday Chandra is currently a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institutefor the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. Hereceived his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. His researchinterests lie at the intersection between agrarian studies, postcolonialtheory, political anthropology,and South Asian history. Uday's forthcomingmonograph, "Negotiating Leviathan", based on his doctoral research in theforest state of Jharkhand, traces how the notion of ‘tribe’ hasco-evolved with modern statemaking processes in South Asia and beyond. Asa postdoctoral research fellow at the MaxPlanck Institute for the Study ofReligious and Ethnic Diversity, he is currently studying circularmigration between the eastern Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand and themetropolis of Mumbai, focusing on the relationship between mobility,modernity, and the making of urban and rural spaces in contemporary India.Uday's articles have appeared in the Law & Society Review, ContemporarySouth Asia, Social Movement Studies, New Political Science, and theEconomic & Political Weekly. He is also the co-editor of forthcomingvolumes on social movements in contemporary rural India (Oxford UniversityPress) and the politics of caste in the eastern Indian state of WestBengal(Routledge), as well as special journal issues on the ethics ofself-making in postcolonial India (SAMAJ) and rethinking resistance incontemporary South Asia (Journal of Contemporary Asia).