Fighting eviction: Local learning and the experience of inequality among India’s adivāsi

Abstract

This article examines pivotal moments in the unfolding of a 5-year action-oriented inquiry into a concrete problem: the enclosure and eviction of the Katkari, a former “criminal tribe” and “particularly vulnerable tribal group” in rural Maharashtra, India. A property boom driven by Mumbai’s economic growth broke the patron–client relationship that provided some security for the landless Katkari, leaving them exposed to eviction from private lands and deepening their experience of inequalities grounded in practices of exclusion, exploitation, and deep-seated hierarchies. Participatory action research with and by the Katkari helped to make sense of the experience of rising inequality and guide actions that were mutually meaningful and useful. Achieving this outcome could not rely simply on mobilizing local knowledge understood as a fixed body of community views and ready-made assumptions about the problems at hand. The experience suggests that the challenge for action researchers committed to knowledge democracy is to facilitate emergent learning within and across social and cultural boundaries, building on what people know but also their capacity to learn, discover, and act on reality. This may also require scaling up participatory analysis through more advanced tools as a response to complexity and unpredictability.