Limits of the adivasi category: Critical notes on writing the ‘indigenous’ in India

Abstract

The recent writings on the communities and peoples hitherto known as ‘tribe’ or categorised under the constitutional-legal nomenclature of ‘Scheduled Tribe’ in India have witnessed a stride towards inaugurating a new scholarship and the concomitant envisioning of a distinctive field of study by way of privileging the category of ‘adivasi’ over the colonial nomenclature of ‘tribe’. As much as these academic/intellectual endeavours are projected as ‘disruptive’ enterprises which foreground the political alterity of the peoples in question, they tend to be beset with haphazard invocations and use contending categories such as tribes, adivasis and indigenous peoples without conceptual clarity. If the category of tribe is considered problematic due to its provenance in the colonial ideological scheme, the disentangling of the category of adivasi from its provincial mooring in the region of Central India in order to be articulated as a universal category encompassing highly discrete groups of peoples in India hitherto known as tribes is no less problematic. In grappling with these methodological and conceptual issues, the objective of this article is constitutive of a genealogical and deconstructive undertaking to underline the limits of the putative universality of the adivasi category. The article further argues that any attempt to conceive of a common epistemological grounding must reflexively engage with the usage of the category emanating from the subjects inhabiting different geographies and denoted by multiple historical and political imaginaries.