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Alpa Shah is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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""In the Shadows of the State" is a fine and unusual study of indigenous politics, culture, and activism, which will be of interest to students of India as well as of the cultural politics of indigeneity elsewhere in the world. Alpa Shah provides a robust and non-sentimental ethnography of the realities and contradictions of tribal life, and a powerful critique of the practices of the state, NGOs, and the highly vocal middle-class activists who promote preservation of both natural resources and pristine tribal life."--Thomas Blom Hansen, co-editor of "States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State"

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In the Shadows of the State

Duke University Press

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...........................................................ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................xiPROLOGUE........................................................................11. The Dark Side of Indigeneity.................................................92. Not Just Ghosts: Democracy as Sacral Polity..................................363. Shadowy Practices: Development as Corruption.................................664. Dangerous Silhouettes: Elephants, Sacrifice, and Alcohol.....................995. Night Escape: Eco-incarceration, Purity, and Sex.............................1306. The Terror Within: Revolution against the State?.............................162EPILOGUE: Arcadian Spaces beyond the Shadows of the State.......................184GLOSSARY OF TERMS...............................................................191NOTES...........................................................................193BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................237INDEX...........................................................................265

Chapter One

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed increasing transnational concern about the lack of a universal system of protection for indigenous rights and development. This concern gained prominence with the formation of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (UNWGIP) in 1982. United Nations established a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000 and appointed a Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people the following year.

More generally, the first United Nations International Decade of the World's Indigenous People (1995-2004) promoted global interest in the protection of indigenous rights and a second such decade began in 2005. While indigenous peoples are highly heterogeneous in their views and agendas, advocates for most groups make certain familiar arguments. These include the ideas that indigenous people around the world have been marginalized for centuries, various settler populations have stolen and colonized their lands, their numbers are in decline, their cultures are threatened, and they live in states that give more weight to the values and interests of the nonindigenous than to those of the indigenous.

The global spotlight on indigenous issues goes hand in hand with an increasing interest in global warming, environmentalism, and people-centered nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Indigenous communities around the world have collaborated with NGOs such as the Minority Rights Group International, the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Forest People's Movement, Survival International, Human Rights Watch, Cultural Survival, and the Rainforest Action Network. Some anthropologists who seek to defend indigenous rights to land and resources have also championed the cause of these peoples. A number of scholars argue that these indigenous actors are resisting their historical subjugation not through the "hidden transcripts" of "weapons of the weak," but through flamboyant "open transcripts" of overt representations and public acts of opposing the nation-states in which they live. Thus they are part of the genre of (new) social movements that lies between mass revolution and small-scale resistance, and that offers marginalized people a political voice besides that offered by mainstream development or Marxism and socialism. The idea is that poor, colonized, exploited, indigenous populations must be protected; their cultures must be preserved; and their rights must be enshrined in U.N. human-rights legislation. As I will show, these are controversial arguments made in the name of the protection of indigenous rights. Globally, they have produced renewed and heated debate among scholars.

India, a country which some say has the second largest indigenous population in the world, is home to over eighty-four million people classified as members of Scheduled Tribes-that is 8.2 percent of India's total population. The official position of the Indian government, however, is that there are no indigenous people in the country. The government's claim is based on the country's complex migration patterns which means that unlike in other nations such as Australia or Canada, it is impossible to identify the original settlers of a particular region. However, beginning in 1985, Indian activists have participated in the UNWGIP meetings. These activists sought to claim indigenous status for India's adivasi populations, peoples previously known as tribals, and who are recognized officially in government censuses as members of Scheduled Tribes. In 1987 the Indian delegates to unwgip represented a newly founded Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, affiliated with the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. The leading members of the Indian group were from what is now the State of Jharkhand.

The Jharkhandi activists claimed that India's Scheduled Tribe populations qualified for the new transnational term "indigenous peoples" because they were culturally different from mainstream Indian society, and especially because they had been internally colonized and dominated by a system of values and institutions maintained by the ruling groups of the country. They argued for the need to secure "the collective right of self-determination" in order to restore "land and forest rights" to India's indigenous people-something that they felt would be possible through negotiation via internationally approved rights and safeguards.

This argument has historical roots. Activists in Jharkhand had been struggling for the autonomy of the region from Bihar State, within the Indian federal union, since the late 1920s. The initial struggles argued for a separate state on the basis that the region housed culturally autonomous indigenous people, classified as Scheduled Tribes by the government, and more popularly known as adivasis. Later, realizing that the demographic reality meant that a significant Jharkhandi population did not count as members of a Scheduled Tribe, at least according to the census, the independence promoters became more inclusive. Their new rhetoric was that Jharkhand was an internal colony of Bihar-that Bihar was reaping the benefits of Jharkhand's mineral, forest, and land resources. This enabled the movement to broaden its social base while maintaining that the area's identity emerged from the exploitation of its population and its distinct cultural heritage, and therefore the region should be restored to its original "sons of the soil." The linking of the cultural politics of Jharkhand with transnational concerns some sixty years later was thus the latest phase of an old movement. Nevertheless, Jharkhand's separation from Bihar on 15 November 2000 was in many ways a triumph for Jharkhand's transnational activists.

The implications of such transnational indigenous rights activism for targeted people in specific localities, however, are far from clear and have received very little in-depth scrutiny. In this book, I explore the lives and experiences of some of the poorest adivasis in rural Jharkhand to analyze common claims made at a global...