Indigeneity In India

264 Pages·2006·4.108 MB·English

by  Bengt G. Karlsson (editor), T.B. Subba (editor)

INDIGENEITY IN INDIA

Who and what are ‘indigenous peoples’? The question has become
highly contentious in India today, where eighty million peoples
belonging to the state category of ‘scheduled tribes’ are attempting
to gain international recognition as indigenous people, as part of
their struggle for recognition and rights in land and resources.
Opponents argue that the term ‘indigenous people’ is a misnomer
that will lead to further division and ethnic animosity in a country
already suffering from community divisions and social conflict.
This volume interrogates the politics surrounding the category of
peoples in India known as ‘tribals’ or ‘adivasis’ and more recently
as ‘indigenous peoples’. It analyses the way in which this category
is being constituted and labelled, and examines the rights and
present predicament of communities designated as such. The work
is organised in three sections dealing with conceptual and
theoretical issues; with case studies in India; and with comparisons
with indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, America and Australia.

The Editors Dr. Bengt G. Karlsson is Director, Nordic Centre in
India, and Dr. T. B. Subba is Professor of Social Anthropology &
Head, Department of Anthropology, North-Eastern Hill
University, India.

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STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY,
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Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung

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Margaret Sleeboom

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Nahid Kabir

Indigeneity In India
Bengt G. Karlsson and Tanka B. Subba
INDIGENEITY IN INDIA

Edited By

BENGT G. KARLSSON
TANKA B. SUBBA

With An Afterword By

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

KEGAN PAUL
London • New York • Bahrain
First published in 2006 by
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© Kegan Paul, 2006

Printed in Great Britain

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ISBN: 0-7103-1210-5

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction 1
BENGT G. KARLSSON AND T. B. SUBBA

Part I Concepts

2 What Should We Mean by “Indigenous People”’? 19
ANDRÉ BÉTEILLE

3 The Politics of Being ”Indigenous” 33
AMITA BAVISKAR

4 Anthropology and the “Indigenous Slot”: Claims 51
to and Debates about Indigenous Peoples’ Status
in India
BENGT G. KARLSSON

5 Tribe, Caste and the Indigenous Challenge in 75
India
TIPLUT NONGBRI

Part II Cases

6 ”We are Van Gujjars” 97
PERNILLE GOOCH

7 “Sons and Daughters of India”: Ladakh’s 117
Reluctant Tribes
MARTIJN VAN BEEK

8 Indigenising the Limbus: Trajectory of a Nation 143
Divided into Two Nation-States
T. B. SUBBA
9 The Aboriginal Toda: On Indigeneity, Exclusivism 159
and Privileged Access to Land in the Niligiri Hills,
South India
GUNNEL CEDERLÖF AND DEBORAH SUTTON

Part III Comparisons
10 Self-Government, Indigeneity and Cultural 187
Authenticity: A Comparative Study of India and
the United States
SELMA K. SONNTAG

11 Indigenous Peoples in Insular Southeast Asia: 209
Definitions and Discourses in Indonesia and the
Philippines
GERARD A. PERSOON

12 Politics Unlimited: The Global Adivasi and the 235
Debate About the Political
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

List of Contributors 247

Index 251
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been long in the making. It had its origin in a
workshop entitled Indigenous Peoples: The Trajectory of a
Contemporary Concept in India held at the Collegium for
Development Studies, Uppsala University, in the spring of 2000.
The workshop was organized by Peter B. Andersen (Copenhagen
University), Mohan Gautam (Leiden University) and Bengt G.
Karlsson (Uppsala University) under auspices of the European
Science Foundation – Asia Committee and with additional funding
from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
(SIDA), The Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities
(HSFR), the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Nordic Association
for South Asian Studies. We wish to express our deepest gratitude
to these institutions as well as to the different people who made the
workshop possible.
The Uppsala workshop was a most exciting experience.
During three hectic days, the thirty participants debated the
relevance of the concept indigenous peoples in the Indian context.
The discussions were most intense and at times turned out very
heated and emotional. This was perhaps because the topic strays
between scholarship and activism, evoking different registers and
sensibilities. Some participants complained that the discussions
tended to be too political or normative, whereas others insisted that
academic research in this field cannot claim a position outside of
politics. After all, the latter argued, peoples’ claim for indigenous
status is a political assertion. In the end, however, we hope that all
the participants gained some new insights and found the exercise
worthwhile. We would like to thank all the participants and
particularly those who took the trouble of travelling all the way
from India. Professor B. K. Roy Burman, who delivered the keynote
address deserves particular mention here. We would also like to
thank Lars-Anders Baer, Chairman of the Swedish Saami
Organisation (SSR), for giving an enlightening account of the
Saamis’ struggle for recognition as indigenous peoples in the
Nordic countries. More than anyone else, our friend and colleague
the late professor B. Janardhan Rao kept the workshop on track.
His tragic death shortly afterwards came as a shock to us all. With
this book we hope to commemorate his memory.
Indigeneity In India
Because of the large number of papers presented at the
venue, it was decided to divide them into two separate volumes.
The present one is thus the first volume, and a second one is
forthcoming (edited by Peter B. Andersen and Mohan Gautam)
which above all will look at the situation in central India (especially
in the new state of Jharkhand). Most of the papers in this volume
were presented at the workshop, but a few have been prepared at a
later stage. We would like to thank each of the contributors, not
least for their patience in seeing the book finally coming out in
print. Our special thanks goes to Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty for
his valuable concluding remarks. Chapter four, by Karlsson, has
previously been published in the journal Critique of Anthropology,
23(4), 2003 and is reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.
Peter Hopkins and Julia Sadowski at Kegan Paul Ltd have done a
wonderful job in steering the manuscript, within a limited period
of time, through publication. We are greatly indebted to them for
this.
Bengt G. Karlsson also thanks the Bank of Sweden
Tercentenary Foundation for a research fellowship grant that has
enabled him to work on this project, and further also his wife,
Louise, for being there and among other things helping to recover
parts of the manuscript that were lost after a computer crash. T. B.
Subba similarly thanks his family members, wife Roshina and
daughter Tarona, for giving him the freedom to work on the
manuscript uninterruptedly.

Bengt G. Karlsson
T. B. Subba

viii
Chapter 1
Introduction

Bengt G. Karlsson
T. B. Subba

"Coca Cola Parches Indigenous Lands". With this headline
CorpWatchlndia launched in April 2002 a campaign to support the
protests against a bottling plant in Kerala, south
India. The plant is said to pollute and diminish the water source
that the local adivasis or indigenous peoples are depending on. The
charismatic leader C. K. Janu was spearheading the protests.1 Janu,
who is chairperson of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha
(AGMS), has figured in the media as a fearless crusader for "tribal
rights". She has been to Geneva to participate in the annual
meeting of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous
Populations and has, during the last few years, been in the
forefront of a larger struggle for the restoration of adivasi lands.
Land redistribution has been a disputed issue in Kerala for
decades, but it has gained momentum with the said organisation's
impassionate demands for immediate allotment of land to landless
adivasi families. In early 2003, events took a dramatic and
unexpectedly violent turn. Apparently frustrated by the state's
inactivity, Janu and other leaders of AGMS along with a large
number of followers occupied land within a wildlife sanctuary,
declaring self-rule over the area. After a standstill of about one and
a half months, the government finally sent in armed
policemen to clear the sanctuary from the "illegal occupants". The
actions that followed are uncertain, but the police evidently opened
fire at activists consisting of men, women and children. In a news
report by the US based indigenous advocacy organization
Cultural Survival, it is said that `anywhere from two to twenty
people were killed’ and many more, both `tribals and policemen’,
were severely injured. Cultural Survival quotes a local journalist
stating that `the tribals were only trying to reclaim their traditional
rights to the forest lands that fall within the sanctuary's
boundaries’.2 In the views of most of the government