34 – Histories of Adivasis/ Indigenous Peoples of Jharkhand and Central India and of Northeast India: Intersecting Journeys

October 3, 2025
8:30 am
H14
This panel seeks to bring together researchers working on ‘Adivasis’/’Indigenous Peoples’/ ‘Scheduled Tribes’ in Jharkhand and central India on the one hand, and on Northeast India on the other. Although these communities have been marginalized in national imagination and in academic writings, researchers working in these different spaces have rarely, if ever, been in conversation; both the regions and communities inhabiting these imagined blocks have been studied differently. By bringing together divergent trajectories of historical thinking and exploring the ways in which the two regions and its peoples have been conceptualized, mapped, represented and governed, this panel will explore how comparative and intersecting histories of Jharkhand and Central India and of the Northeast can be written. Approximately 80–100 million people, ‘Adivasis’/‘Indigenous Peoples’/‘tribes’ are categorized as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ under the Indian Constitution. On the basis of their experiences, the geographical spaces inhabited by the Scheduled Tribes have been governed separately under the Fifth and Sixth Schedule. In order to explore how comparative and intersecting histories of these regions can be creatively written, this panel will reflect on the following themes: the history, politics and impact of scheduling both in the colonial and postcolonial period; the interdependence of landscapes and livelihoods that breaks down the binaries of hills/forests and plains, the mobile and the settled; the instability of boundaries and borders created by the state when confronted with everyday practices of communities; the politics of representation and classification that have led to the creation of categories and the idea of the ‘primitive’; the importance of religion in shaping identity; state practices of repression and surveillance in the name of development etc. Panelists are requested to reflect on some of these themes and add others relevant to the panel.

Convenors

Dr Sangeeta Dasgupta
Professor Vinita Damodaran

Presentations

Legal Reform and Minority (in) Law 1874-1947
Ray Reeju - Max Planck Institute of Legal History and Legal Theory, mpi-lhlt, Frankfurt, Germany
Colonial reformism and the indexing of native and settler in northeast India
Medhi Abhilash - Mount Holyoke College, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, United States
Quandaries of Developmentalism: Framing Research on Central and Northeast India
Kumar Brinda - Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
‘We are Israel’. Identity assertions among ethnic groups on the Indo-Myanmar border
GUILLAUME PEY CECILE - CNRS, EHESS, PARIS, France
Seeing Tribes, Types and Photographs: Photography’s Civic Negotiations
Guha Sudeshna - Professor, Dept of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence, Greater Noida, Gautam Buddh Nagar, India
Jal, Jungle, Jameen: Adivasi Dispossession and the Paradox of Development in Odisha, India
Dungdung Madhusmita - Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, Indore, India
Reading Man in India, Tracing Anthropological Narratives
Dasgupta Sangeeta - Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Resonating Roots: Exploring the Literary Dialogue Between North-East Tribes and Adivasis
Das Mrigakshi - School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom