Between Global Flows and Local Dams

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Between Global Flows and Local Dams:Indigenousness, Locality, and the

Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India

Kaushik GhoshUniversity of Texas, Austin

Not long ago, Arjun Appadurai stressed that we need to think ourselves beyond

the nation (1996:158). His reason for this postnationalism was not only evidence

of the unprecedented transnationalization of people and the mass media but also his

political charge that the nation-state increasingly constrains the lives of local sub-

jects who reside in its territory. Such subjects are forced to occupy neighborhoods

that are produced by the nation-state as its own context rather than being context-

generating themselves. Thus, referring to the Brazilian states brutalization of the

Yanomami, Appadurai writes,

The Yanomami are being steadily localized, in the sense of enclaved, exploited, perhapseven cleansed in the context of the Brazilian polity. Thus, while they are still in a posi-tion to generate contexts as they produce and reproduce their own neighborhoods, theyare increasingly prisoners in the context-producing activities of the nation-state, whichmakes their own efforts to produce locality seem feeble, even doomed. [1996:186]

According to this logic, then, the way out of such a confinement in the nation

would obviously lie in the increasing transnationalization of the locality brought

about by mass-mediated discourses and practices, including the discourse of human

rights, that tend to destabilize the nation-state. For indigenous subjects like theYanomami, the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) has in fact

become one such transnational space, producing new postnational contexts, and

hence neighborhoods, a phenomenon that has been called a case of indigenous

place making in the literature (Muehlebach 2001). I have no doubt that the

WGIP is a transnational locality. I would also agree that it destabilizes certain

national contexts of indigenousness. However, in this article I point out that

such destabilizations may or may not help indigenous people in their specific

struggles in relation to the nation-state and the various forms of capital that maycirculate through it today.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 4, pp. 501534, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360.C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-

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502 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Through an ethnographic narration of how the WGIP, as just such a transna-

tional locality, meets up with a specific national context of indigenousness in India,

I question the fait accompli of the transnational as postnational liberation. In fact,

I argue that, in certain postcolonial contexts like India, WGIP-like transnational-

ism introduces a politics of place that undermines the struggles through which

indigenous people have historically attemptedand to some extent significantly

succeededto wrest certain autonomies within the formal dominion of modern

states. These strugglesmostly connected to rights to landhave a long history

that is integral to the history of the modern state in India, both colonial and national,

and their political idioms, aspirations, and imaginaries were forged and continue to

circulate outside the contemporary transnational discourse of indigeneity. In re-

lation to these struggles, this transnational discourse is marked by an awkwardness

of fit and a reconfiguration of the political process that ends up excluding the vast

numbers of the indigenous who are engaged in struggles against neoliberal projectsthat threaten them with displacement. More alarmingly, although it makes these

traditions of struggle invisible, this new transnational discourse of indigeneity has

effected the production of a nucleus of new political leaders who no longer need

to be involved with the everyday struggles of land and territory but are continually

encouraged to perform and fit the paradigms of a transnational indigenous

subjectivity that has little resonance in the localities occupied by such populations

in India. Consequently, the numerous indigenous struggles within the nation-state

of India have failed to find a larger national leadership, and newly formed indige-nous states are being run by political parties and formations that have historically

been populated by upper-caste Hindu groups, which are the principal source of

exploitation of the indigenous peoples in India.1 At a time when the displacement

of indigenous populations has gained new intensity under neoliberal state poli-

cies in India, the transnationalized leadership is conspicuous by their absence in

the multiple sites of resistance to these new forms of displacement that mark the

national map.

The specific instance that I explore here is the case of the Koel-Karo move-

ment in the state of Jharkhand in eastern India. It is a 30-year-old movement of

Munda, Oraon, and other tribal (adivasi) villagers against the construction of two

large dams of a hydroelectric project planned on the South Koel and Karo rivers.2

The movement was not organized by activist or nongovernmental organizations

(NGOs), and although it is somewhat known to activists across India, it has re-

ceived little media attention. Nonetheless, it is one of the rare examples of the

successful prevention of the construction of massive dams on indigenous lands in

India in a long and rich history of determined struggles in India by tribal peoples

against forces of displacement. Today, as a transnational discourse recognizesthese tribal populations as indigenous, it has attracted significant participation

by a group of elite adivasi leaders from Jharkhand and elsewhere in India. The

participation of this elite has affected its understanding of adivasi culture and in-

digeneity in ways that shape its relationship to adivasi movements, such as the


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INDIGENOUSNESS AND THE TRANSNATIONAL SPHERE 503

Koel-Karo, which are led by local adivasi villagers with little direct linkage to

transnational forums. I argue that these local contexts can tell us much about the

dangers of deploying a transnational discourse of indigeneity without attending

to the nature of its specific translations in specific sites. If such struggles have

emerged from a historical negotiation by adivasi groups of the modern state and

colonial governmentality, then we must pay close attention to how this history

articulates with the global discourse of indigeneity.3

The transnational discourse of indigeneity turns on a politics of recognition

that is at the heart of the modern form of power we call governmentality.4 How-

ever, tribal populations, who are the objects of transnational indigeneity discourse

today, have a long history of living other histories of governmentality in relation to

the modern state, both colonial and national. The forms of recognition that were

deployed in that long dur ee of governmental power were forged in the interstices

of tribal resistance and state technologies of governance as a form of domination(Banerjee 2000; Ghosh 1999; Mamdani 1996). The constitutional, legal, and gov-

ernmental rationalities of a nation-state such as India contain a variety of such

grids of recognition in relation to adivasis. These need to be also looked at as a

historical map of adivasi contestation of governmentality.5 Such a history has ren-

dered the project of nation-state governance of such populations particularly open

to counterrepresentations and resistance in the form of numerous and frequent

popular adivasi movements like the Koel-Karo.

In this article, through a brief reading of the Koel-Karo movement, I developan analysis of how spaces of adivasi contestation emerge as unanticipated effects of

the governmental rationalities of the nation-state. Through such a demonstration,

I challenge the implicit dichotomy of the coercive nation-state and a liberating

transnationalism that seem to inform the contemporary discourse of indigeneity in

both the academy and the larger space of transnational activism, NGOs, and liberal

institutions. Specifically, I point to the problem of how the transnational discourse

of indigeneity has insufficiently grasped the openings that such populations have

created in the folds of domination by the nation-state, and in fact it unwittingly

threatens to undermine such openings by producing a different form of indigenous

subjectivity that marginalizes the vast majority of the indigenous populations in

countries such as India.6

In the next section, I introduce a brief sketch of adivasi struggles in Jharkhand

in connection to the history of Indian modernity. These struggles have a rich 200-

year-old history, which cannot be grasped by trying to equate adivasi struggles to

the configurations of a transnational indigenous subjectivity. Moreover, I suggest

that adivasi subjectivity has an ambiguous location in national modernity in India,

being both inside and outside the temporality of the Indian state, which allowsus to understand local adivasi political consciousness as being both tied to the

discursive contours of the Indian nation-state while not being fully contained

within them. Following this, I develop a theory of two types of governmentality,

both of which are necessary for understanding various forms of adivasi political


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identity and explaining how adivasi movements like Koel-Karo emerge in relation

to the history of governmentality in India. Having thus framed the space of adivasi

politics within the nation, I then proceed, in the subsequent two sections, to

provide a contrasting account of how transnational discourses of indigeneity affect

the imagination of adivasi identity through the example of one of the prime leaders

of the Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ICITP). In this context, I

point to the enormous divergence in the understanding and deployment of notions

of indigeneity by subjects who are differently located in relation to the transnational

indigenous forum, in both its discursive and institutional manifestations. I also

demonstrate how movements like Koel-Karo cannot be grasped from within the

space of transnational indigeneity discourse.

I then turn to a critical assessment of the latter in relation to adivasi identity.

I demonstrate how the operation of a discourse of essential indigeneity severely

limits the creativity of adivasi politics. A small example follows to illustrate thefluidity and dynamism of an older adivasi discourse in Jharkhand, prior to and out-

side the transnational. The article concludes with a discussion of governmentality

as a mode of power as seen through the example of indigeneity in Jharkhand that

has been presented here. I point to certain problems in contemporary discussions

of governmentality in academic writings and suggest that we need to be attentive

to a heterogeneity in the processes of governmentality to prevent us from turning

it into a form of all-encompassing, omniscient, and omnipresent knowledge. I end

with an epilogue, which is again an invitation to think of other possibilities ofradical knowledge and politics of indigeneity/adivasiness beyond the severely

limited domain of a UN-based transnational imaginary of indigenous people.

Indigeneity and Indian Modernity

When it comes to indigeneity and indigenous resistance, our imagination

has been deeply influenced by a binary around the nation-state. Within the bor-

ders and the time of the nation-state, indigeneity is marked by exploitation and

immense coercion. However, beyond the nation-stateor in the time-space of

the transnationalindigeneity arrives as the time of resistance and rights, self-

determination and sovereignty. Implicitly assumed in most discussions of indi-

geneity today, this binary has the effect of making invisible the histories of the

struggles of tribal populations in the interstices of the discourses of state and citi-

zenship, prior to their recognition in the transnational imaginary of indigeneity.

Tania Lis otherwise thorough disassembling of indigeneity in Indonesia, for ex-

ample, still tacitly traces a history that locates the origins of the struggles of such

populations in the temporality of the transnational discourse on indigenous people

[that] took hold in activist circles in the final years of Suhartos rule (2000:149).

Thus indigenous struggles are narrated today as an assemblage of the prior context

of nation-state policies and coercions and the operation of a transnational indigene-

ity movement that is locally translated and deployed by activists and indigenous


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people against the oppressions of that prior context. The historical struggles by

the indigenous within the nation-state (i.e., before the time of the discourse of

indigenous people) become invisible, and thus their impress on the processes

of the contemporary cannot be recognized.

In terms of the transnational indigeneity discourse, India has the second-

largest indigenous population in the world. As is the case with the Indonesian

state, the Indian state does not recognize the legitimacy of using the term indige-

nous people for its tribal populations. However, unlike the Indonesian state, it has

a long history of affirmative action and administrative and territorial recognition

in relation to such populations. These forms of recognition have both colonial and

postcolonial origins precipitated as a result of state efforts to contain a remarkably

rich series of tribal struggles. In fact, the constitutional guarantees promised to

tribal populations give us an inadvertent map of the history of these struggles.

The term adivasithe most commonly used designation for tribal populations inIndia todaywas a neologism produced by Jharkhands tribal leaders in the 1930s,

signaling the arrival of a new imaginary of a unified tribal identity.

This does not mean that there is no circulation of the transnational discourse

of indigeneity among adivasi populations in India. The ICITP, as the organization

that most prominently represents the case of the indigenous people of India at the

WGIP, is overwhelmingly composed of leaders from the Jharkhand state in eastern

India.7 This is not surprising, because Jharkhand, which was granted statehood in

November 2000 by splitting the existing state of Bihar, had been the site of thelongest (more than 60 years) and best-known movement of adivasi peoples for ter-

ritorial autonomy within the state of India (Devalle 1992; Jharakhanda Sahayaka

Samiti 1988; Prakash 2001).8 In the course of the Jharkhand Movement, a signif-

icant middle-class adivasi leadership has emerged, as have a number of political

parties that define themselves through a discourse of adivasi identity (Sachchi-

dananda 1979; Singh 2004). From the late 1980s, some of these adivasi leaders

and young adivasi activists, who have significant higher education and fluency in

English, have aggressively pursued the various international indigenous peoples

forums, especially the WGIP, with the hope of advancing the cause of adivasi

autonomy, including the demand for a separate Jharkhand state. The pursuit of

this new form of politics was particularly made possible with the formation of the

ICITP and the access to the WGIP that this enabled. The arrival of Indian adivasis

at the transnational indigenous forum thus cannot be read as a nascent awakening

of a spirit of resistance. Both the transnational indigenous people movement in

Indian adivasi history and the more extensive movements for self-determination,

such as the one pushing for the establishment of a Jharkhand state, are strands

woven out of a longer, complex, and very active history of adivasi struggles in thecontext of the formation of Indian modernity, both colonial and national.

The demand for autonomy in Jharkhand arose out of the experience of the pre-

dictable story of indigenous displacement in the face of development. Jharkhand

has been Indias richest mineral wealth producer from the mid19th century.


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Mining and other projects such as large dams, factories, and forest reserves have

led to the severe territorial and cultural displacement of adivasis and their con-

sequent conversion into a cheap labor force under both the colonial and national

governments (Areeparampil 1989; Fernandes and Thukral 1989; Ghosh 1999).

While the statehood movement has continued unevenly since 1938, there have

been other, more localized movements against displacement through development,

which emerged particularly from the early 1970s in Jharkhand as they did in other

parts of India, most often in adivasi areas (Baviskar 1995). Of these, the Koel-Karo

movementin the heart of Munda tribal landis particularly salient for having

stopped any significant land acquisition by the state for the hydroelectric project

in the Koel and Karo river valleys. The project aimed at acquiring 55,000 hectares

of land from a minimum of 112 villages, threatening about 150,000 people, for

the generation of 710 megawatts of electricity (Madhukar 1992).

As with most Jharkhandi local movements against displacement, local adivasipeasant leaders have led the Koel-Karo movement. The one among them who is

most crucial to the movement and central to my account below is Soma Munda,

a 60-year-old village headman who is also the elected official of the panchayat

(local governing council), which is the most basic level of government in India.9

It is on the land of his village that the main dam on the Karo River was to be built.

Soma Munda is a subsistence farmer. He has never been part of the Jharkhand

Movement for statehood. His class and political positionings exclude him from

being an active part of ICITP. The reasons for this will become clear as we goon. This does not mean, however, that Soma Munda is unconnected to the Indian

nation-state or to transnational spaces, although his connections may be different

from those of the leaders in the ICITP. Apart from being an elected official of

the state, Soma Munda spent 15 years in the Indian army, took part in two wars,

and in the 1960s was called up for duty in the UN armed force that was sent to

Lumumbas Congo.

Significantly, a number of new leaders in Jharkhand who have been at the

forefront of antidisplacement movements against development projects have had

long years in the Indian military. This experience gave these new national subjects

a close knowledge of the modern state. At the same time, they also embody an

aura of essential tribal Otherness for the state itself. Army recruitment in Jharkhand

from adivasi groups is very heavy, well beyond any measure of proportionality.10

At one level this has to do with the fact that the military is one of the few places in

which adivasis are guaranteed a nominal equality and steady pay. However, adivasi

recruits also would often recall the army as a place where we were respected for

being especially good soldiers. As was the case with colonial labor recruitment,

army recruitment is also deeply involved with an imaginary of the primitive oth-erness of the adivasi, which is uncontaminated by a weakness of the physique

marking more civilized peoples (Ghosh 1999). This imagination is linked to the

development of a discourse of martial races in the military recruitment practices

of the colonial state during the 19th century (Fox 1985; Onta 1996). There are


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important differences as well, which for lack of space I cannot go into here.11

Thus adivasis are positioned both inside and outside the state through these very

practices. They are included through discursive practices that also simultaneously

effect a necessary exceptionalism. Adivasis are aggressively recruited into the mili-

tary, which lies at the heart of the states modernity project, but at the same time this

recruitment requires them to be essentially outside the temporality of the modern.

Subjects like Soma enter the state through discourses of a primitivist essentialism.

They may be quintessential state subjects in one context and be outside or against

the state in another; in fact, the two modes need not be in conflict and may very

well be connected.

This in itself starts problematizing Appadurais concept of the nation as

a restrictive context. The nation form produces its populations, such as the

adivasis, through certain modalities, but these hardly function as one monolithic

embrace that restricts the imagination of its subjects. Adivasi subjects are ambigu-

ously located in relation to the nation-state, precisely because of the multiple and

fragmented nature of the latter. This contingent nature of the state, produced out

of the processes through which it constitutes its populations, is quite unlike the

all-encompassing unity that citizen-subjects often assign to it in their imagining

of what the state is. In this sense, the figure of the adivasi repeatedly acts as a

deconstructive case in Indian modernity in particular and the metaphysics of the

state in general.

Indigenousness and Two Modes of Governmentality

I propose that the inside/outside problem of adivasi ethnicity indicates two

modes in which the modern state builds on a colonial originary framing of the

primitive in India. Colonial discourse constructed tribal (adivasi) India as an ir-

reducible otherness in relation to Hindu India. Tribals were pre-Aryan, and the

Hindus were the Aryan invaders from at least 3,000 years ago (Trautman 1985).

By and large, the Aryans were the bearers of civilization, and tribal India was

outside of historical time or at least in the dawn of it. Adivasi rebellions during

the colonial period often aimed at the Hindu landlords and moneylenders in their

territories. Colonial administrators and historians explained such rebellions as a

response to the continuation of an ancient racial order in which tribal non-Aryans

were exploited by Hindu Aryan invaders, without mentioning how the nontribal

landlords, moneylenders, and traders of the colonial period were a new population

that had actually been created and encouraged by the colonial state in its effort

to increase revenues and generate a sense of productive ordering of tribal lands

(Guha 1983a).12

Having thus constructed this essential primitive otherness of Indias tribes,

the colonial state would work on it in two dissimilar ways. One was a process of

gradual assimilation through the rule of law and the market. In so doing, tribal

othernessits relative remoteness from market exchange and private property, for


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examplewould be recognized, somewhat adjusted to, but with a final teleology

of bringing the adivasi into the time of capital. This process of addressing ethnicity

through inclusion I will call incorporative governmentality.

The other process of working this alterity was the reverse. Here the essential

pre-Aryan otherness was a signal for the separation of tribal India from the domain

of an AryanHindu or Indian mainstream. The argument in this case lingered on

the originary relationship between invaded and invader and the consequent need

for protective justice that it entailed. This approach, of course, completely elided

the fact that the vast displacement and severe exploitation of tribals under the

colonial state were related to the new modes of colonial land tenure and the new

landlords and moneylenders that these modes of tenure spawned, backed by the

force of the colonial army.

Thus, the numerous tribal revolts against the local landlords in colonial

Jharkhand would become evidence of an age-old pattern of HinduAryan ex-ploitation of pre-Aryan tribals. The result of such a framing would be protection in

the form of tribal land protections, autonomous areas usually under the paternalist

rule of a government commissioner or Christian missionaries. Such modality of

government through exclusion from a putative mainstream has variously been

termed as indirect rule, scheduled areas, or frontier agency. In such a process

of protection through isolation, tribal ethnicity would be considered not easily

compatible with market principles and capitalism (Banerjee 2000). They have to

be ruled according to their customary laws, which then have to be discovered anddocumented. This is where colonial anthropology of course emerged. The more

important point for my argument here, however, is that in this second form of

relating to a foundational tribal otherness or ethnicity, the principle of recognition

is that of exclusion. I will call this exclusive governmentality. It is from within this

dichotomous frame of governmentality that our concepts of common law and

customary law make their appearance.13

Thus I am dealing with two different modes of governmentality, both of

which work through the recognition of ethnicity. States, whether they are colonial

or postcolonial ones, in the very logic of accomplishing their governmental tasks in

relation to their populations, recognize different subjectivities that do not fully cor-

respond to the homogeneous time of the citizen.14 Governmentality and ethnicity

thus have a close relationship outside of the homogeneous time of citizenship.

However, put together, the two faces of colonial governmentality, which continue

in the postcolonial nation-state, have complex effects on constructions of tribal

ethnicity. The reservation of jobs in public institutions, firms, and officesa form

of positive discrimination long extended to tribes and lower castes in Indiais

the obvious example of an incorporative governmentality that most typically func-tions through enumeration. The tight fit between identity and enumeration, which

Bernard Cohn (1987) was one of the first to point out, is well illustrated by the

typical response of most literate Mundas to the question, Who is an adivasi? or

Are Mundas adivasis? They would answer, Of course Mundas are adivasis; we


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are on the Scheduled Tribe list. If you are an adivasi, then you are on the list, thus

referring to the list of ethnicities that the state recognizes as Scheduled Tribes. 15

Enumerated ethnicities are, thus, the objectified and generic products of the work

of the state in recognizing cultural difference. As several authors (e.g., Anderson

1998; Chatterjee 2004) have pointed out, these ethnic categories are characterized

by a rigid boundedness; they transcend context and are, thus, not fuzzy: You

either are or are not X. These are the characteristics that make such ethnicities

perfect terrain for the growth of nationalism, where identity and time have to be, at

least ideally, homogeneous and perfectly coincidental (Appadurai 1996). Certain

adivasi subjects like the adivasi middle classthe exclusive class identity of the

ICITP leadersare clearly more exhaustively defined through state enumeration.

Such a class, dependent as they are on schooling and urban office employment

as their sole mode of economic survival, is a prime candidate for inhabiting this

empty, taglike version of adivasi ethnicity.16

The adivasi populations that are directly targeted by the exclusive aspects of

governmentality in India are largely rural. Unlike the middle-class adivasi popula-

tions who do not depend on rural lands or forests in the same immediate sense, these

populations are engaged in agriculture and are significantly dependent on their

multiple uses of forests. Therefore, questions of land and displacement, as in the

case of Koel-Karo, directly affect them, and the legacy and practice of exclusion or

land protection have a daily relevance. But exclusive governmentalityalthough

a significant part of the modality of operation of the modern statealways hasto be recessive to incorporative governmentality. The work of modernization and

the rationalization of custom must continue somehow for the modern state. Pro-

tected tribes are brought in through institutions of missionary education, through

banking and financial exchange logic in the form of rural cooperatives, and finally

through the generation of modern employment, typically in the form of migrant

labor recruitment.17 But for its part, the originary essentialism of tribal difference

continues to inflect these rationalizations of an incorporative governmentality, as

Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) has forcefully shown, as a cunning of recognition.

However, it also often ends up making available a space for adivasis them-

selves to act on their putative irreducible otherness: they can both define themselves

in opposition to the state and a mainstream national community and devise projects

of noncooperation around such an identity. In the following section, I sketch one

instance of how the practices of exclusive governmentality have come to pro-

duce some key spaces within which very lively and intense adivasi protests and

mobilizations have taken place in the last few decades in India. The Koel-Karo

movement can be partially located within just such a space.

Land Is What They Know to Live On. Money Is Not for Them

Tapkara is a fairly important market center in the Torpa block of Ranchi

district in Jharkhand. It is the most important market in the Karo region of the


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Koel-Karo project. Apart from several streets of shops selling household provi-

sions, clothes, medicines, and bicycles, two market days are scheduled weekly

when the entire local economy is mobilized. Adivasis, converging on Tapkara

from a number of villages in the area, sell their produce, forest products, timber,

and firewood and buy a range of everyday items brought in by vendors who are

connected to the national and international economy through complex networks

of distributors, agents, moneylenders, and wholesalers. However, beyond the eco-

nomic transactions, these markets act as a crucial space in which extravillage tribal

sociality is produced and reproduced: news of births and deaths is shared, marriage

proposals are made, friends and lovers meet, and the mail and money orders sent

by migrant family members are picked up from the postman. If the colonial reading

of the adivasi was that of a primitive who was not rational enough to grasp the

abstraction of money and markets and thus adivasi society needed to be isolated

from markets for its own survival, here we see the market in precisely the oppositeguise. It is a crucial node in the reproduction of adivasi kinship and sociality. It

also allows adivasis a space to interact with non-adivasi persons (dikus), especially

traders, moneylenders, and others who would not necessarily be present in every-

day adivasi village life. Such interactions act as contexts within which a certain

kind of situated self-abstraction in relation to the larger world is produced.

Kaleshwar Chowdhry is a trader (bania) who lives in Tapkara. I first met

Kaleshwar one morning at Tapkara market in 1995. I was with Soma Munda, who

had reached Kaleshwars shop to sell lac, the resin-like secretion of certain forestinsects used in the making of lacquer and varnish among other things.18 We sat on

a bench in front of his spacious, warehouse-like shop; Kaleshwar sat on a mattress

bed (gaddi) across from us. To his right were the large and ancient-looking scales

used to weigh the bags of lac brought in intermittently by the villagers. In his fifties

then, Kaleshwar had studied at the local missionary high school with Soma.

It did not take much time for Kaleshwar to start talking about the lack of

development in the area. He mentioned how in another panchayat, the elected

official had organized the villagers to have a road built at minimum cost and had

forced the government to provide all the funds. Kaleshwar was exhorting Soma to

take this example and convince the people to come together and contribute to such

projects:

How long do you think our sonsyours and mineare going to bike around? Theyhave motorbikes today; theyll get cars tomorrow. Can anyone drive a car on theseroads? Why cant these people [adivasi villagers] get their senses back and stop protest-ing against the government all the time? Okay, maybe [they] do not want the [Koel-Karo] dam, why not the roads? They just dont know whats good for this place. Just

imagine if there was a proper drivable road from Tapkara to Lohajimi.

Lohajimi is Somas village and the planned site of the main dam of the Koel-Karo

project. Soma listened with his characteristic silence and a slightly amused smile.

At last he spoke,


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We had asked the government to build the road up to Kalet [a village five kilometersfrom Lohajimi]. But it couldnt be the NHPC [National Hydro Power Corporation, thestate corporation in charge of the Koel-Karo project] who could do that. NHPC has togo. Let the Public Works Department build it; let them entrust our village council withthe job. The government insists it has to be the NHPC.

Kaleshwar now became less guarded. He had been trying to restrain himself

from condemning the antidam sentiments of the people. But now he began a more

direct attack: They will get so much more money than I or other traders would.

Why cant they understand that it is to their benefit to get this dam built here? Its

lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of rupees, beyond the farmers dreams.

Again Soma was amused. But he continued politely, You know how adivasis

are, touching Kaleshwars arm in a gesture of feigned solidarity in their mutual

knowledge of adivasi low consciousness and backwardness. He said, You give

them money, and they drink it all uphere, there [latar-patar]; fights, screaming,quarrelsthats what money brings for them. Land is what they know to live on.

Money is not for them.

How can anything work with that kind of talk? All development cant stop

because of this! Kaleshwar was visibly irritated now.

Well you go and convince them, I cant, Soma said.

But you are the elected mukhia [panchayat head]; convincing ignorant vil-

lagers is your work.

Lets say, then, that I have failed in that work, Soma said with great resig-nation but equally great confidence.

Later on as we walked out from Kaleshwars shop, I was wondering whether

Soma Munda really believes that adivasis know little better than spending all their

money in drinking. As we talked about it, Soma revealed that he did think that

adivasis have a problem in handling money and resisting the temptations of drink.

I then saw in one glimpse how Soma Mundas world, his understanding of his

people and of the adivasi intellectuals understanding of that world, can never live

outside the colonial discourse on tribes. Yet there was also that smirk on Somas

face, and soon he was telling me how he drinks up profusely whenever NHPC

or Land Acquisition officials are reported to be coming. Whenever he knows

the powers he is dealing with are much too powerful for a dialogue and for his

voice to make an impact, he submits fully to that statist symbol of savagerythe

drunk adivasito redeem such racism as a weapon in the adivasis fight to save

themselves.

At the heart of the adivasi discourse of sovereignty based on land, therefore,

lies the belief that the adivasi is incapable of handling money: Land is what

they know to live on. Money is not for them. Although Soma articulated this

in a dusty, remote corner of the world, the echoes of this truth about primi-

tive nature reverberate through much of the colonial archive and are central to

the arguments of Georg Simmels The Philosophy of Money (1990), the most

extensive modern theoretical work on money (see Banerjee 2000). For Simmel,


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money is the perfection of all abstractions. By allowing for fundamentally dissim-

ilar objects to enter into exchange, money signifies the ability to go beyond the

concrete and the contextual contained in the social life of things. Money is not only

a perfect form of abstraction but also a perfect form of purity, a human possibility

that is unmarked by the vagaries of space and time. That is why money (and the

state), for Simmel, is the truly universal. In this sense, money is the perfect em-

bodiment of civilization and, along with the state, the sign of a universal humanity

(Simmel 1990:82) that cannot be eroded or compromised by social conventions

or historical accidents. In fact, Simmel writes that the inability to comprehend

money in this abstract manner leads to the primitiveness of the primitive. In-

stead of grasping it as of purely mediatory value, the primitive conceptualizes

money as a thing in itself. As a means to an object in the future, money leads to

progress. It thereby demonstrates the functioning of the Hegelian Subject who can

grasp the world objectively and thus act on it through an exercise of a rationalwill. The primitive, however, mistaking money itself as the end or as the object,

is not able to will that future into being but is caught in the immediate present in

which money is spent to produce an animal-like and sensual pleasure. Money as

pure abstract exchange is investment for a deferred and more productive future

(the kind that Kaleshwar imagined); money used in the primitive sense of an em-

bodiment of immediate needs and desiressuch as alcohol and drunkennessis

the primitive form of money or, in effect, the absence of it.

The conversation between Kaleshwar Choudhury and Soma Munda expressesprecisely this colonial common sense about tribes and Simmels logic of money and

the primitive. Although Kaleshwar did not imply that the Munda adivasi farmers are

primitives in Simmels sense of not knowing the true value of money, nonetheless,

it is a widely held belief in Jharkhand and in India across various class and caste

boundaries. Kaleshwar was not about to suggest this while trying to convince

Soma Munda that the adivasis should accept monetary compensation for their

land from the Koel-Karo project. Soma, on the other hand, returned precisely to

this argument to indirectly argue for the impossibility of land acquisition based

on monetary compensation and hence the improbability of achieving an adivasi

consensus in favor of building the dam.

What started as a racist logic in a system of exclusive governmentality pre-

scribed for tribal regions of colonial India has come to produce a mode of resistance

that the modern state had hardly bargained for! However, this essentialized, nega-

tive identity centers on the adivasi inability to grasp that the universality of money

and modernity have had an important role to play not only in colonial paternalist

protection or in Soma Mundas deployments but also in nation-state governance

itself. In 1998, the Supreme Court of India passed a judgment whereby all de-velopment projects that threaten to displace adivasi populations must work with

a land-for-land rehabilitation plan as opposed to rehabilitation through monetary

compensation.19 Today, this has become standard for all projects displacing adi-

vasis; rehabilitation cannot be done in the form of monetary compensation but


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only through land-for-land exchanges. Yet this policy is not very practicable in

a country as densely populated as India. Legally, at least, it is quite complicated

to accomplish, and as a result there is increasing pressure from bureaucrats and

industrialists to override this landmark judgment.20

What began as an act of exclusive governmentalitythe recognition of the

negative and separate nature of tribal/adivasi identitybecame an aporia in the

project of incorporative governmentality. To incorporate the subjects of alterity, to

make them continuous with the time of the modern, the state now has to include

this alterity as a conceptual basis of its actions. In the process, the very context

of the nation-stateits legality and governmental projectsis fundamentally re-

drawn. Even more important, this reveals that the functioning of this exclusive

principle of governmentality may at times interrupt the hegemony of the state and

its projects of governance. If the original object of an exclusive governmentality, in

the case of adivasis, was the prevention of revolts and other acts that challenge thelegitimacy and the functioning of the state, in its reproduction by Soma Munda in

the context of the Koel-Karo movement or revolt, we have the inadvertent result

of the subversion of the project of development of the contemporary state. Not

all situations would produce such subversion, but its very possibility, not to men-

tion its actual materialization in different sites, becomes intrinsic to the process of

governmentality and the career of the state.

To speak of indigeneity in the Indian context, then, is to speak of a complex

interwoven history of adivasi movements and exclusive governmentality. Togetherthey compose an unstable discursive terrain within the history of national moder-

nity in India. Persons like Soma Munda or new rebellions like the Koel-Karo

movement are at the heart of a distinctly dynamic indigenous political world that

holds much promise with regard to the possibilities of a politics of indigeneity. Such

worlds are not receding residues of an original, authentic indigeneity. Rather,

they are the products of a long struggle between governmentality, as a colonial

and national mode of power, and adivasi populations. The latter are deeply marked

by this struggle but as they inhabit and deploy this power they also rework it to

produce unanticipated dilemmas for the state and corporations.

Planning and the Matter of Self-Determination

The essential lack in the adivasi, according to the modern stereotype, is also

the lack of planning. Hence they have no ability to invest and no ability to handle

money properly. PSM,21 one of the founders and ex-president of the ICITP, once

lamented this while supporting the technology of big dams. At a seminar organized

on the Koel-Karo project by anti-dam activists, he said, We need big dams; how

else does any country get electricity? The problem with us adivasis is that we dont

know planning. To live in the modern world you need to have minute-by-minute

planning. Dams are not a problem, if we adivasis have our own state and if we can

plan. PSM is of course part of a middle-class adivasi leadership that emerged out


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of the opportunities made available through job reservation or affirmative action

policies. Such a leadership was deeply involved in the demand for a Jharkhand

state in the 1980s and 1990s. Their vision of ethnicity and its connection to the

future state was also much closer to the enumerated ethnicity that is the effect of

incorporative governmentality. PSMs vision of a Jharkhand state revolved around

the preservation and nurturing of various tribal cultural essences built around the

theme of harmony and equality, the supposed opposite of the caste principles of

mainstream India. In a now famous pamphlet presented to the Indian government,

he made the case for a separate state on the basis of these sorts of oppositions.

However, in the very demand to locate ones ethnicity in the form of the modern

state, which would run on the basis of modern planning, the pamphlet betrays the

mode in which a middle-class Jharkhandi leadership finally has to collapse the

problem of difference into the empty national time of statehood.

Within such a state, PSM once said to an audience in the United States, propercultural traditions will be preserved and improved. For example, if the dance floor

is gone in a tribal village, so is the village. It is as good as dead. We must preserve

and improve the dance arena in all villages; training can be provided to teach

villagers the proper dance and musical traditions. So dance and village life are at

the core of adivasi Jharkhandi identity, but these need to be identified, preserved,

and objectified and then reformed to make them up-to-date and allow them to

shine. PSMs specific training in linguistics at a university in the United States

has spread into his translations of Munda oral poetry, which are done according torigorous classificatory methods of linguistics, informed by his numerous Mundari

grammar books and shaped by his attempts at the strict formalization of cultural

idioms. One of his favorite projects has been to try and create a codified and

formalized grammar of Jharkhandi dance and music in terms of the quintessential

tribal village. For adivasi leaders, territorial sovereignty is imagined in the form

of a modern state, and their political engagement has primarily taken the form

of mobilizing demand for such. PSMs cultural nationalism, however, makes the

matter of culture the exclusive domain of expert knowledge. Cultural activity then

awaits state formation; once the state is obtained, cultural vitality is sure to follow.

In this process of imagining the state as the key to all beginnings and cultural forms

as a matter of expert knowledge, local, on-the-ground struggles to protect tribal land

by tribal villagers become peripheral and even antagonistic to the understanding

of the political of a middle-class adivasi leadership. As long as these leaders

participated in the electoral process, certain solidarities with locals could be

displayed, but this had no bearing ultimately on the modality of their political

discourse, which was exclusively focused on getting statehood.

As nationalisms histories have taught us too well, demand for statehoodhas to ultimately work through the production of hegemonies in relation to the

masses who can then be led toward the empty homogeneous time of the nation-

state (Chatterjee 1986). This would need an entire set of negotiations with various

sectors of the population. The most elite of Jharkhands leadersin the confidence


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of knowing Jharkhand as a homogeneous, objective, enumerated ethnicity available

for the shaping of expert knowledgehad moved far away from the project of

producing such a nationalist Jharkhandi hegemony.

By the 1990s, the so-called mainstream Indian parties had accepted the im-

portance of the demand for a separate Jharkhand state, especially in the context

of the increasing integration of the Indian economy into global markets and con-

sequently the significance of Jharkhands mineral and industrial wealth. This was

particularly true of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The irony is

that the Hindu nationalist movement has its origins among the traders (like Kalesh-

war), moneylenders, and other petty bourgeois classes who are the most direct and

visible exploiters of adivasis and against whom the latter have often mobilized.22

However, through organizing and building on the actual projects of governmental-

ity or developmentschools, small-scale development projects, youth programs,

employmentthe powerful Hindu nationalist movement started to win electionsin Jharkhand from the early 1990s, while Jharkhandi leaders like PSM remained

stuck with their imagination of a completed project of Jharkhandi culture that only

awaited the gaining of statehood.

Jharkhand was formed in 2000, initially through a formal legislative bill

brought forward by the federal government, which was dominated by the Hindu

nationalists who had made the issue of granting statehood to Jharkhand a part of

their national election campaigns. The subsequent elections were overwhelmingly

won by the Hindu nationalist coalition, and they formed the first state government inNovember 2000. Since its formation, Jharkhand has been ruled by the BJP, although

it has had token adivasi chief ministers drawn from the ranks of rural adivasi youth

who had been recruited and trained by Hindu supremacist organizations for over

three decades. Within the first two weeks of the formation of the new government,

it declared that building the Koel-Karo dam and the need to control militarily a

growing Maoist guerilla movement in large parts of rural Jharkhand were the first

priorities of the state. Over the next few months the rural police were rearmed and

put on high alert. Bunkerlike structures were built at police stations and outposts

(Balagopalan et al. 2001). On February 1, 2001, the police opened fire on villagers

demonstrating in the Tapkara market against an instance of police brutality and

killed eight people not very far from Kaleshwars shop (Balagopalan et al. 2001;

Bhatia 2001). This was the first instance of such violence in the 25-year-old Koel-

Karo movement. Following this incident, PSM and other middle-class leaders of

the Jharkhandi political partieswho had been devoid of a formal political role

in Jharkhand since the state was formedmade some perfunctory visits. Whether

through the ICITP or any other organizations, they did not organize support for the

terrorized populations in the Karo area; nor did they agitate against the killings innational or transnational forums.

I return later to the fate of the Koel-Karo project, but here I want to linger on the

middle-class adivasi leadership as the products of an enumerated ethnicity enabled

by incorporative governmentality. By the late 1980s, this middle-class leadership


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had formed ICITP, and by the middle of the UNs Decade of Indigenous People

(the 1990s), they found in Geneva an alternate space of political potency. In this

further removal from the nitty-gritty, on-the-ground realities of Jharkhand, such

a leadership had even less space for struggles such as Koel-Karo. Being adivasi

had taken on other meanings that were performed for other audiences and in other

spaces. The consequences of such a remove can be traced through a conversation

that I was part of in 1996 between Soma Munda and PSM.

Ethnicity and Its Fantastic Locations: Of Switzerland, Tapkara, and Other

Tribal Places

We sat in a tea shop in Tapkara, close to where the police firing claimed eight

lives five years later in 2001. Back in 1996, we were meeting against the backdrop

of fresh initiatives by the Indian state to relaunch the Koel-Karo project.

PSM: Somaji, I heard that youve again got land acquisition notice from thegovernment?

Soma Munda: Yeah, we have got notice, but no one will sell.PSM: Somaji, the government is not going to stay put; they will put more

pressure.SM: That is true, but see our point is very clear. We are following the law; we are

going by the 1985 Supreme Court ruling on Koel-Karo. We have offered,as per the Courts decision that takes Bonai and Koche [two villages in the

Karo area] as model villages and let the government rehabilitate them. Acomprehensive rehabilitation has to be done; the Courts ruling includesthe question of proper land, culture, sacred groves, and temples [sarnamandir] as part of rehabilitation.

Kaushik Ghosh: Do you think we should really be going by the Courts ruling? Where atleast 110 villages are to be fully drowned, dont you think it is dangerousto work with only two villages as a model? It is not so difficult to provideproper rehabilitation to two villages. But just on that basis they can startthe work on the dam itself. This is a little problematic if you ask me!

PSM: But it is a Bihar government job.23 There is so much bureaucracy andcorruption [here] that I do not think they will be able to rehabilitate the

people of Bonai and Koche and start the construction.SM: No, it is not easy. Rehabilitation has to take place in accordance to the

Chotanagpur Tenancy Act [CNT Act].24 S. C. Roy has written in the act[here Soma mentioned clause and paragraph numbers] that in case ofland acquisition based on the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, rehabili-tation must be done with an eye toward not destroying the community.Thus, members of one patrilineal clan [killi] cannot be resettled in differ-ent places. So, if the government tries to relocate Koche or Bonai, thenthey will be taking members of the Guria clan away from the remainingmembers in the other 50 and more villages. Otherwise, they will haveto take all the Gurias of these over 50 villages to one contiguous area.You tell me, where is that land in Jharkhand, where is it in the whole ofIndia? We have always said, if the country will develop by sacrificing us,we will sacrifice ourselves, but we cannot do it illegally in opposition tothe CNT Act and the Supreme Court! If the government can resettle uslegally by the dictates of the act, we will move. But we know they cannot,they cannot do this thing legally.


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PSM: Somaji, how will a country work if you say such things! In modern timesyou cannot stay put like that.25 It just wont do. I have a different sugges-tion. Why dont you let the government rehabilitate Lohajimi [Somasvillage]. You say there is no land, come on! The government should giveus a piece of the Saranda forest, how much do we want after all! Just cleara piece at the edge of the forest, and if we can ensure it, we can make a

beautiful village there, a model village for the whole of Jharkhand.SM: Thats a good idea, but the work has to be done legally, by the Courts

order. It is not possible to break the killi, otherwise you are very right.PSM (clearly irritated): No, you dont seem to understand my point. Jharkhand

can become a great place; our people can live in much better villages;we need to build well-planned villages. I have seen beautiful villages inSwitzerland on the sides of mountains. We can have villages like those,absolutely beautiful, prosperous! Its very peaceful, those villages.

SM: Yeah, you are probably quite right. I agree with you, but the CNT Act isthe problem; killis cannot be separated, unless one amends the CNT Actin the Parliament. After that even Lohajimis rehabilitation is possible.

Our strange and almost surreal conversation ended soon after this, with PSM

leaving in his car and Soma and I turning back toward the newly resignified village

of Lohajimi. We started climbing a slight hill along the red laterite road, very typical

of Jharkhand. The late afternoon sun hung low on the horizon, a horizon lined with

the silhouettes of a semiarid tropical vegetation; I looked aroundlocal date palms;

the knobby, hardy sal trees; mahua, the flower of which makes the delicious drink

of Central India; baer trees, known also as kul; muruhbah or palash; putush, a

kind of shrub; bambooit was hard to imagine alpine pines here. I kept turningover the entire conversation in my mind. Switzerlandstanding in for Europe and

Progress hereseems to always enter my life in a predictable form: it embodies

a desire of the bourgeois subjects of marginalized modernities to have a heady,

heavenly concoction of innocence and modern developmentunspoiled nature,

white as the alpine snow; yet it oozes with the wealth and luxuries of modernity, a

wealth that seems to leave no scratches on the surface of the earth. Later I would

read Michael Taussigs (1995) recollection of a mythic Switzerland in the faraway,

marginal modernity of his Australian childhood in the 1950s: the intense, body-

shuddering ecstatic opening of packages of Swiss butter sent by a grandmother who

lived in Switzerland, the butter encompassing all that was excessively innocent and

wealthy about a modernity that had eluded them in Australia.

Now I desperately asked Soma, Did you make any sense of that, what they

had come for? It worries me. To this Soma responded,

Dont worry so much, these people always come like thisby car, suddenly. I knowvery well what to tell them. Last month, when you were gone for those two days,Jharkhand Mukti Morcha party people had also come. It is time for the vote. Theywanted to give leadership to the Koel-Karo movement. I kept saying, Yes, yes. I saidif they give us support we will gain in strength, but we should lead our movementourselves; if they want they can definitely give us support like the way we give to theJharkhand movement, a little from the outside. When these folks come, I just keepagreeing, Yes, yes, You are right, and soon they depart and leave us alone; therewill be no sign of them till the next elections. What rehabilitation and land acquisition?


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Does anyone here have the courage to sell their land on their own? They will not evenmanage to save their lives; people will hack them to pieces. I am the panchayat head,even I, if I secretly take money for the dam, people will chop and throw away my head.These people just come and immediately leave again. We, after all, live right here.

Although I felt agitated by the insertion of Switzerland as a template for a future

Jharkhand, I noticed that Soma Munda did not react at all to this point. I, on my

part, had recognized in PSMs statement the continuation of a commonplace Indian

bourgeois dream of Switzerland as the sign of a fantastic modernity. I still do not

know what Soma thought then, but I suspect that his silence signified the impos-

sible distance that has been emerging between middle-class adivasi leaders like

PSM and Jharkhands subaltern classes. Switzerland, which seemed so close and

plausible for the former, could barely evoke any meanings for Soma. This distance

between two classes of adivasi leaders in Jharkhand points to a difference in the way

adivasi identity and the very nature of the political are articulated among them.

Here Switzerland embodies the locationboth literally and metonymicallyof

the form of politics and cultural imagination that has come to inform leaders like

PSM. It seems to spell out the radically different dreams that propel the elite and

subaltern leaders of Jharkhands adivasis today.

ICITP: Transforming the Adivasi into the Indigenous

PSM was president of the ICITP at the time of the meeting in Tapkara de-scribed above. ICITPs exclusive focus is the WGIP located at the United Nations

in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1987, ICITP has been demanding at the WGIP that

the Indian state recognize the presence of indigenous peoples in India and their

right to self-determination. The Indian state has characteristically responded that

no scholar can say with any degree of certainty that the scheduled tribes in India

are the only indigenous populations of India according to any established criteria.

. . . There is no certainty as to who displaced who and which of the races in India

today are the descendants of the conquered or the conquerors (ICITP 1989:8).

The Indian government, on the other hand, recognizes the marginalization of lower

castes and tribes in the paternalistic language of backwardness and weakness

and accordingly holds out the constitutionally framed offers of educational and job

reservations. Consequently, the status of all such groups, including that of tribes,

becomes that of cultural minorities. As cultural minorities alone, however, it is dif-

ficult to gain from the principles of the UN Working Group, because the identity

of indigenous is of paramount importance there: The term Indigenous people

refers to populations living in countries which have a population composed of

differing ethnic and racial groups, who are descendants of the earliest populationliving in an area and who do not as a group control the national government of the

countries within which they live (WGIP 1983).

As is well known, the specific histories of conquest in the Americas and

Australia make such definitions fairly workable but, arguably, make the case more

complicated for tribal groups in Asia and Africa. Lokayan, an Indian NGO, takes


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on the problem in an interesting way in its report to the WGIP in its capacity as

an NGO with consultant status in the United Nations. Lokayan wrote: What is of

crucial importance is not the fact that a group of communities might be the only

originalsettlersoftheregionorpartoftheoriginalinhabitantsoftheareabutthefact

that the processes of colonization or colonial policies affected in a significant and

cultural manner the economies and the cultures of groups of populations (ICITP

1989:9). The effect on tribal populations has been especially deep, which the Indian

state itself recognizes but tries to manage only through positive discrimination.

Lokayan argues, however, that the policy of discriminatory protection was only

available to a few (who could access it); they (the protected) became part of

the mainstream economically, culturally and often times [became] mediators in

the discourse between the mainstream and the large masses of the tribals whose

lives remained untouched by the policies. Lokayan then adds, It is obvious

from our report that the Scheduled Tribes are reduced to a colonial situation andare dominated by a system of values and institutions maintained by the ruling

groups of the country (ICITP 1989:9). So, in the spirit of the resolution of the

WGIP, the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes in India should be recognized

as indigenous peoples.

ICITP, however, persistently claims indigenous status based on origins and

continuity. It is an effort to meet the WGIP resolution to the word. Through out the

1990s Decade of Indigenous Peoples, ICITP organized several conferences around

the theme Who Are the Indigenous People of India, but this quite predictablyproved to be a murky issue that is not quite amenable to rigorous scholarship. While

ICITP fights the Indian state in terms of a global discourse of indigenousness, it

has been variously allied to several NGOs in Europe such as the Society for Threat-

ened Peoples (STP), headquartered in Gottingen. The discourse of indigenousness,

which such NGOs are deeply committed to, is one of an authentic indigenous cul-

ture, innocent and pure, that must be saved and liberated from exploitation by the

various nation-states.

Indigenousness: A Global Ethnoscape

The operation of the imagination of indigenous people through the mecha-

nisms of the United Nations and associated NGOs could be called the operation

of a global ethnoscape, in the sense that Appadurai uses it. It is also a post-

national global order where familiar anthropological objects have apparently

been displaced.

In Appadurais terms, the WGIP and ICITPs practices would imply that what

it means to be tribal today can no longer be understood in terms of the local contextand particular places. Rather, we have to look at how a global, deterritorialized

imagination of indigenousness invokes and signifies new effects of locality. Yet one

still has to subject this apparently descriptive project to serious critique and ethical

query. I still need to ask, If this is so, how do we evaluate this moment? What is

our intellectual analysis of it? If this is the story of late modern primitivism, what


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are the ways in which we can understand its effects, incitements, and exclusions?

The ICITP, STP, WGIP, and the United Nations all form various pieces in this

global ethnoscape, which turns on a certain affect: a neoprimitivist discourse of

which many have lately written about (Brosius 1999; Conklin and Graham 1995;

Tsing 2005). GB, an activist from the STP, on a visit to Jharkhand, once told me,

I have never breathed such pure air in India. It is at one level the continuation

of a much older discourse of primitivism, the invention of a pristine primitive

figure who acts as a persistent critique of a decadent modernity. At another level,

however, sutured to the discourse of governance and civil society and the economic

reason of globalization, this discourse privileges a metropolitan activist as the sole

moral authority in the judgment of third world nation-states in relation to their

indigenous populations. This moral authority is pitched in the name of democracy

via civil society, but its configurations are such that it does not need to engage with

the specific histories and politics of the particular populations involved.By constructing a pure indigenous subject, this moral authority first invokes

the discourse of cultural rightsanother universalismand then goes on to create

a domain of politics where individual states and their metropolitan judges are the

sole agents involved in the production of democracy. There are many aspects of this

imagination, including the formation of a new global, multicultural citizen-subject

of late modernity. Is not this subject the European subject, the same one who initi-

ated this fantasy of the primitive in the first place? It is so, with an important caveat.

As Zizek (1997) writes about the culture of multiculturalism, multiculturalists donot appreciate or depreciate the Other in relation to their own culture. They, in

fact, disavow the position of being from a culture, a disavowal that makes them

the ideological subjects corresponding to the new form of transnational capital: a

global company that disavows any attachment to any particular nation while turn-

ing all nations into the zone of its colonization, including that which we may still

associate it with. Through this disavowal, multiculturalists can be universal and

thus partake equally of any culture that they may want to savor. The ethnoscape of

a global indigenous people discourse is a similar zone of multiculturalism, the

extreme visibility of the primitive body contrasting with the complete invisibility

of the viewer.

The critical modality of this transnational sphere is of course the attack on

the nation-state. In the case of India, transnational indigenism reinvokes the older

colonial imagination whereby all questions of exploitation of the tribal can be lo-

cated in an original Aryanaboriginal conflict, located deep in the very foundations

of the entity called India. In this vision, the colonial state was the only guarantee

of protection for the tribal. Amiya Kisku, the first president of ICITP, thus said in

a speech at the United Nations:

British colonial rule was interested more in money and wealth. But in the area of [the]socio-cultural realm, the British officials and scholars made extensive ethnographic,historical and religious studies. Indology developed as a distinct discipline and thephilosophical, cultural and socio-religious values were spread all over the world. Theytried to look at Indias social and religious customs and practices from a human and


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humanitarian point of view. Anthropology as a separate discipline of studies also devel-oped at university levels and castes, tribes, languages in India were widely researched,provision for political treatment of the depressed classes, tribals, backward communi-ties were made for better administration and welfare. Provision for autonomous tribaldistricts were made. Some legislation [was] passed for the protection of [the] lands oftribal people; in Chotanagpur and Santal Parganas, Tenancy Acts were passed to save

alienation of tribal lands into the hand of dominant society [HinduAryan groups]. Infact, the Scheduled Castes and Tribes were treated as indigenous people of India bythe British colonial power. [ICITP 1989:1314]

In addition to the way in which this passage erases the entire history of con-

quest, violence, and cultural destruction under British colonialism, it also prepares

the ground for the erasure of the modality of late capitalism. PSMs own response

to the question of structural adjustment and its potentially very grave consequences

for Jharkhand bears this same faith in metropolitan goodness. At a conference

in the United States in 1995, PSM had commented: About the entrance of globalcapital, i.e. MNCs [multinational corporations], they are not at all a threat to me.

World Bank people are after all genuine human beings, they will listen to the rep-

resentatives of ICITP. At an earlier conference in India, Amiya Kisku stated: If

we want to ensure our rights, we have to appeal to the international organizations,

like the World Bank and the United Nations. The World Bank is with us, they have

the most sympathetic charter for the protection of indigenous peoples interests

and will be a safeguard against the Indian State (Kisku 1992). In this operation of

a very different kind of White Love, which was generated in colonialism and isbeing reinvented in the contours of the indigenous people global ethnoscape, the

operative logic is what Spivak (1988) has called white men saving brown women

from brown men. Here we can appropriately replace women with indigenous

people: white men (and women) saving indigenous people from brown men.

In this particular love for indigenousness and the corresponding desire economy

for whiteness lies the secret of the strange invocation of Switzerland on that

afternoon in that rickety tea shop in Tapkara. The effect of the operation of such

a global ethnoscape, in terms of place and locality, is thus the removal of a cer-

tain strand of adivasi leadership from a place-based practice of politics (Escobar

2001) and any significant effort to enter into a dialogue with tribal villagers. The

adivasi leadership become literally deterritorialized, not answerable to anyone in

any specific site of Jharkhand.

The mode of cultural imagination and the mode of politics in this transnational

public sphere complement each other. Although its multicultural vision produces

an essentialized, static, and authentic picture of adivasi identity, transnational

indigenous people discourse removes all politics to the exclusive domain of

transnational governance and civil society based on a discourse of abstract humanrights. With such a coupling of culture and politics, the domain of culture gets

delivered to the final rule of law, which can operate in empty homogeneous time

to guarantee the protection of an abstract, noncontextual culture of indigenous-

ness. Culture, through this multicultural domain, now becomes cultural rights,

fully guaranteeing adivasi identity as a contractual agreement in the terms of law.


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Koel-Karo and other like social movements will then only work within the con-

fines of law, and liberal reason and their sovereignties would finally be brought

within the rule of citizenship, human rights, and civil society. Such a discourse of

transnational indigenousness, gaining its power from primitivism and institutions

of the United Nations, seeks out token indigenous persons who are amenable to

this project of global modernity and who can also stand in for the indigenous pop-

ulations concerned. PSM and various members of the ICITP are the token figures

of this global discourse.

In fact, through this new transnational domain of UN-based indigenous pol-

itics, the tokenized leaders find a new way of remaining in political currency

without having to address the undemocratic relations that divide them from the

local adivasi enclaves. If one does not like what a Soma Munda may say about

development, the law, or indigeneity or if he is not conversant with global fan-

tasies and dreams emanating from Switzerland, one can just leave and return to thesafety of the transnational indigenous space. Jharkhandi political society under-

goes a further and more serious death in the process; and along with this political

demise, the chances of a democratic tribal polity become even more remote. By

inserting the modern essence of indigenousness into the new power of deterrito-

rialized ethnoscapes, a new globality reinvents a museumized locality that is

severed from the histories of struggle and imperatives of revolt.

Contingency and the Imagination of Adivasiness

In the ICITP-like imagination, as we saw with PSM, adivasiness as

indigenousnesshowever complicated on empirical groundscan always be

located in its wholeness in the past and the future. In contrast, the possibilities

in that other space of adivasi ethnicity, where a Soma Munda puts together his

local versions of adivasiness, can be quite unpredictable. This version of ethnicity

and belonging is deeply contingent and is much more inventive and flexible. Let

me offer an example here. In the course of studying the Koel-Karo movement in

the middle 1990s, I often wondered about the question of the collective. One of

the remarkable aspects of the movement was the depth of the unity among the

villagers of the Karo valley. How was such a determined collective forged? This

was particularly important to ask in light of the fact that although the majority

of villagers were Munda adivasis, a significant number were from other ethnici-

ties including non-adivasi ones. This included the Rautia community. Rautias are

classified today by the incorporative developmental state under Other Backward

Castes, a state classification for affirmative action purposes that indicates that,

although these are not untouchable castes, they are low in the caste hierarchy and

historically were discriminated against by the upper castes. From the early colo-

nial period, however, Rautias used to be the local landlords in several villages of

the Koel-Karo region, and the Mundas actively remember their exploitation by

them. Although they were landlords, they were small and marginal ones; and after


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independence, their situation has been worse than that of many Munda adivasi

families in these villages. Largely illiterate, the community has not been able to

develop much traffic with the lucrative domains of the modem state, and after the

postindependence de-recognition of landlord ownership, they possess little land.

In such a context, it is remarkable that Rautias and the Mundas were so closely

allied against the construction of the Karo dam. I asked Soma about this: How is

it that Rautias and Mundas have managed to remain united against the dam? After

all, the Rautias were the landlords who forced the Mundas to provide corvee labor

[beth-begar]; so many people still remember their family members being forced

to carry the landlords palanquin [dola] or working long days without pay on the

Rautia fields. Soma responded with a glint in his eyes:

All this was true in the past. But they lost all their land after independence. Theirways have been mended as a result. Now they have become adivasis again. They workon these same fields themselves, just like the Mundas. They produce their lives withtheir own hands from this soil. They do not live like dikus anymore, living off otherpeoples toils. This land now acknowledges them. And their spirits [ bongas], they aremore numerous than ours, and all connected to this land, this forest. They live here.

This was an unexpected reading of adivasiness and indigeneity. In the frame-

work of the state, the Rautias would certainly not be adivasis. Nor would they

be so considered by most Jharkhandis, adivasis or otherwise. But within the lo-

cal complexities of memory, the Koel-Karo movement, and the rituals of worship

and work, new ethnic configurations become imaginable. Thus, reconstellatingthe category of the adivasi through an entirely different domain of materialityof

land but of spirits tooSoma, paying little heed to state or ICITP efforts to define

adivasiness and non-adivasiness once and for all, makes possible a different

future in this very present.

Conclusion: Governmentality and Indigeneity

My intention behind the critique of the transnational indigeneity discourse in

relation to adivasi political life in Jharkhand is not about the establishment of a grid

of authenticity involving an original local and a spurious global. I have pro-

vided an analysis of aspects of the discursive field of the Koel-Karo movement that

clearly emanate out of an older history of colonial governmentality without being

strictly determined by it. Nor am I making a claim of a necessary impossibility of

alliances between different local and global sites. In fact, I would argue that there

is a great need for such alliances especially today, when, the developmental state

of the postdecolonization era having been brought within the logic of neoliberal

capital, most subaltern efforts to target the actors behind the various projects of

displacement by demanding proper accountability from them are easily frustrated.

Especially in this domain of pursuing global corporations and international in-

vestors and stockholders behind such projects, transnational activist organizations

are now crucial. Yet it is precisely such alliances and reinforcements that have been


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prevented because of the way that the transnational indigeneity discourse has rec-

ognized adivasi India through the ICITP. A politics of indigeneity that exhausts

itself through the establishment of a pure and essential adivasi identity embodied in

a handful of adivasi leaders, who in the process remove themselves from crucial

struggles against the displacement of adivasi populations in Jharkhand and India,

not only fails to produce those alliances but in fact attenuates these struggles. It

is ironic that the Koel-Karo movement, which is one of those rare instances of a

successful indigenous struggle against displacement through development, is what

clashes with the indigeneity imaginary unleashed by the transnational indigenous

movement.

Rather than posing a question of the authenticity of ICITPs leaders, I am

interested in the effects on adivasi populations of the politics of recognition

embedded in the form of governmentality that is indexed in the transnational in-

digeneity movement of the WGIP. My approach to the transnational indigeneitydiscourse follows Tania Lis general query, What do these schemes [of improving

the human condition or governmentality] do? What are their messy, contradic-

tory, multilayered, and conjunctural effects? (2005:384). But in mapping such

effects, I do not feel we can avoid politically and ethically evaluating them as

well, which Li feels is the kind of weakness witnessed in James Scotts (1998)

question, Why have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition

failed? (Li 2005:384). Failure to evaluate these effects leads to a reading of gov-

ernmentality where the differences among various histories of governmentalityare made inconsequential. This happens because of an unexamined need to define

and map governmentality in an omniscient and universal manner. As in the case of

Li, most commentators on governmentality are so focused on demonstrating the

advantages of this formulation of power over older formulations such as James

Scotts, which posit an outside to power, that we get a scenario where governmen-

tality is turned into an all-seeing, omniscient, and omnipresent force that allows

for no outside to it. Thus practices of governmentality seem to always be one step

ahead of popular initiatives. Even when a particular governmental project fails,

we still want to see in it a popular demand for a better project, thus plotting

the remorseless setting in of the larger logic of bringing all humanity within the

liberal discourse of demanding improvement and welfare from government.

In the literature on governmentality, we consistently encounter a purposeful ra-

tionality of government that encompasses all initiatives for or against it. From

the perspective of indigenous struggles like Koel-Karo, however, we would still

need a more evaluative and less universalistic framework of governmentality. If

the transnational indigeneity movement has failed to reinforce such struggles, then

what, instead, has such transnationalism produced, and why? How does this helpus in differentiating among different histories of governmentality in relation to the

struggles of indigenous peoples?

The last question also brings me to the question of agency in our formulation

of governmentality. As I have mentioned before, exclusive governmentality in rela-

tion to adivasi populations in India involves a discourse of the adivasis being more


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authentically rooted in the land as opposed to money and the market. Although this

opposition of land and money has seeped into the legal domain as well as adivasi

common sense, which then reappears as an important point of resistance against

attempts to compensate the displaced through the more easily obtained package

of monetary compensation, the recognition of adivasi rights to land was orig-

inally produced as a cumulative effect of massive and persistent tribal revolts

against the colonial system of 18th-and 19th-century India and Jharkhand. There-

fore, projects of governmentalityeven if they are definitively marked by liberal

notions of welfare and improvementare also often determined by the history

of subaltern (nonliberal) revolts. Such a history does not necessarily sit comfort-

ably with the needs and compulsions of the regimes of modern governance. As

we saw with the question of rehabilitation, distant events of adivasi revolts in the

colonial past, through the machinery of governmentality, can produce a present

reality that hardly meets the needs of a neoliberal government obsessed with thebuilding of infrastructure, such as hydroelectric projects, to propel India into

the league of superpowers. Governmentality, then, in practice is a deeply com-

promised game. It contains profoundly contradictory elements, largely because

of the fragmented imprints of other forms of knowledge, ontologies, and tem-

poralities. Unlike recent commentaries on governmentality (e.g., Li 2005), this

does not lead to a picture of an all-knowing rationality that just cunningly recog-

nizes and redeploys the histories of subaltern resistance without also unraveling

itself.This brings me to the further issue of a tendency in recent literature to posit

governmentality, explicitly or implicitly, as a form of power that precludes coer-

cion. In Partha Chatterjees Politics of the Governed(2004), coercion and repeated

violence remain unmentioned as he struggles to lay out a terrain of governmen-

tality that seems to always operate through recognition, negotiation, dialogue,

mutually agreed-on settlements, and inclusion. Chatterjees interest of course lies

in establishing the framework of an alternate modernity where the liberal subject

of European modernity is historically unavailable beyond a small section of elites.

Governmentality becomes the form of power through which other subjectivities

and temporalities could be recognize

Between Global Flows and Local Dams

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