Alf Nilsen Examines Democratic Struggles in the Adivasi Heartland

Current debates and research on adivasi struggles in India tends to focus on the Naxalite movement in central and eastern India and resistance against large-scale processes of dispossession. Important as this phenomenon may be, there are also other traditions of Adivasi struggle in other regions of the country which, if given their due attention, can enrich and diversify an increasingly polarized debate over subaltern agency and strategy. In a paper delivered to the South Asian Studies Council Colloquium, Alf Nilsen, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY, will investigate the character and trajectory of democratic mobilization among Bhil adivasis in western Madhya Pradesh.

October 10, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

The first part of the paper outlines the contours of adivasi subordination in western Madhya Pradesh, focusing on how adverse incorporation into the region’s economy has been compounded by de facto disenfranchisement in relation to the local state. He then moves on to trace the historical origins of adivasi subordination in the western Indian region more generally - focusing in particular on the effects of the restructuring of sovereignty that occurred under the aegis of the colonial state. The third and final part of the paper analyzes the ways in and extent to which grassroots struggle rooted in the Bhil communities of western Madhya Pradesh in the 1980s and 1990s have succeeded in democratizing local-state society relationships in the region, and discusses the ramifications of these experiences in terms of prospects and strategies for adivasi emancipation in contemporary India.

Dr.Nilsen’s research focuses on social movements in the global South and India in particular. He is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge: 2010), a study of the Narmada anti-dam movement, and co-editor of Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance (Palgrave: 2011) and Marxism and Social Movements (Brill: 2013).