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ABSTRACT
In recent years, indigenous movements and rights-based struggle has become a focal point of research on resistance. In the context of India, Adivasi struggles in pre- and post- colonial times have been centered on the issues of jal, jangal and jameen (water, forest and land). In 2018, what became known as the Pathalgadi movement emerged in various villages in the state of Jharkhand. Pathalgadi, a traditional practice of erecting stone slabs for various purposes, was refurbished as a means to claim rights to local-level democracy and management of resources. This paper explores the strategies of resistance employed by the movement in Simdega district, where the raising of Pathalgadis primarily focused on claiming forest rights through existing legislations. The first section seeks to situate forest governance and struggle in the region, revisiting contributions from subaltern theories to shed light on the current and historical context of resistance. Based on four empirically driven categories of resistance, the second section brings forward an analysis of the movement, demonstrating how resistance occurred primarily through legal means, with strong discursive elements. As such, the Pathalgadi movement is seen to be working within the letter of the law, merely claiming rights previously granted through legislation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Ramachandra Guha, ‘Forestry in British and Post-British India: A Historical Analysis’, Economic and Political Weekly (1983): 1882–96; Uday Chandra, ‘Beyond Subalternity: Land, Community, and the State in Contemporary Jharkhand’, Contemporary South Asia 21, no. 1 (2013): 52–61.
2 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (London: Yale University Press, 1985).
3 Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kevin J. O’Brien, ‘Rightful Resistance Revisited’, Journal of Peasant Studies 40, no. 6 (2013): 1051–62.
4 Nandini Sundar, The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2016); Connor Joseph Cavanagh and Tor A. Benjaminsen, ‘Guerrilla Agriculture? A Biopolitical Guide to Illicit Cultivation within an IUCN Category II Protected Area’, Journal of Peasant Studies 42, no. 3–4 (2015): 725–45; Sarah Jewitt, ‘Political Ecology of Jharkhand Conflicts’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 49, no. 1 (2008): 68–82.
5 Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Eric B. Ross, ‘Land Rights, Conflict, and Violence Amid Neo-Liberal Globalization’, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 19, no. 1 (2007): 1–4.
6 Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, ‘Guerrilla Agriculture?’, 725–45.
7 Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, India’s Environmental History: From Ancient Times to the Colonial Period: A Reader (Hyderabad: Permanent Black, ‘Himalayana’, 2012).
8 Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, ‘Guerrilla Agriculture?’, 725–45.
9 UN General Assembly, ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, UN Wash 12 (2007): 1–18.
10 Purabi Bose, ‘Forest Tenure Reform: Exclusion of Tribal Women’s Rights in Semi-Arid Rajasthan, India’, International Forestry Review 13, no. 2 (2011): 220–32.
11 Ministry of Tribal Affairs, ‘Change in Criteria for Inclusion in St List’, 2017, https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1514486.
12 Alpa Shah, ‘The Dark Side of Indigeneity?: Indigenous People, Rights and Development in India’, History Compass 5, no. 6 (2007): 1806–32.
13 IWGIA, ‘Iwgia Urgent Alert Regarding Gross Human Rights Abuses Towards Adivasi Forest Dwellers in Jharkhand, India’, 2017, https://www.iwgia.org/images/documents/urgent-alerts/Urgent_alert_Jharkhand_India2017.pdf.
14 Sanjoy Patnaik, ‘Pesa, the Forest Rights Act, and Tribal Rights in India’ (paper presented at the International Conference on Poverty Reduction and Forests, Bangkok, 2007).
15 Anne M. Larson and Jesse C. Ribot, ‘Lessons from Forestry Decentralisation’, Realising REDD+: National Strategy and Policy Options (2009): 175–87.
16 Pratap Mohanty and Rabindra Garada, ‘Forest Rights Act & Community Conservation Initiatives in Odisha: Exploring an Alternative Regime of Forest Governance’, Journal of Politics and Governance 5, no. 3 (2016): 35–47.
17 Soumitra Ghosh, ‘Compensatory Afforestation: “Compensating” Loss of Forests or Disguising Forest Offsets’, Economic & Political Weekly LII, no. 38 (2017): 67–75.
18 Kanchi Kohli et al., Pocketful of Forests: Legal Debates on Valuating and Compensating Forest Loss in India (New Delhi: Kalpavriksh & WWF-India, 2011).
19 K. B. Saxena, ‘Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act and Rules: Deforestation, Tribal Displacement and an Alibi for Legalised Land Grabbing’, Social Change 49, no. 1 (2019): 23–40.
20 Shiba Desor, ‘Forest Goverance at the Interface of Laws Related to Forest, Wildlife & Biodiversity’, Natural Justice and Kalpavriksh, Pune (2015): 64.
21 Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Aradhana Sharma, ‘Specifying Citizenship: Subaltern Politics of Rights and Justice in Contemporary India’, Citizenship Studies 15, no. 8 (2011): 965–80; Uday Chandra, ‘Rethinking Subaltern Resistance’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 45, no. 4 (2015): 563–73.
22 Ranajit Guha, ed., On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India., Ubaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).
23 Ranajit Guha Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said, Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
24 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2014).
25 Partha Chatterjee, ‘After Subaltern Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly (2012): 44–9.
26 Nilsen and Roy, New Subaltern Politics.
27 Chandra, ‘Rethinking Subaltern Resistance’, 563–73.
28 Ibid.
29 Alf Gunvald Nilsen, ‘Adivasis in and Against the State: Subaltern Politics and State Power in Contemporary India’, Critical Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (2012): 251–82.
30 John L. Comaroff, ‘Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A Foreword’, Law & Social Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2001): 305–14.
31 Ibid.
32 Minati Dash, ‘Rights-Based Legislation in Practice: A View from Southern Orissa’, in Social Movements and the State in India (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
33 Mindie Lazarus-Black and Susan F. Hirsch, Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2012).
34 Nandini Sundar, ‘The Rule of Law and Citizenship in Central India: Post-Colonial Dilemmas’, Citizenship Studies 15, no. 3–4 (2011): 419–32.
35 Arun Agrawal and Joanne Bauer, ‘Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
36 Bose, ‘Forest Tenure Reform’, 220–32.
37 Ibid.
38 Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
39 James C. Scott, ‘State Simplifications: Nature, Space, and People’, Nomos 38 (1996): 42–85.
40 Bose, ‘Forest Tenure Reform’, 220–32.
41 Chandra, ‘Beyond Subalternity’, 52–61.
42 Alpa Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
43 Shah, ‘The Dark Side of Indigeneity?’, 1806–32.
44 Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 173–93.
45 Chandra, ‘Beyond Subalternity’, 52–61; Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Alf Gunvald Nilsen, ‘Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 29, no. 3 (2016): 269–87.
46 Crispin Bates and Alpa Shah, Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2017).
47 James C. Scott, ‘Domination, Acting, and Fantasy’, The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror (1992): 55–84.
48 Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.
49 Chandra, ‘Rethinking Subaltern Resistance’, 563–73.
50 K. S. Singh, ‘The Munda Epic: An Interpretation’, India International Centre Quarterly 19, no. 1/2 (1992): 75–89.
51 Chandra, ‘Beyond Subalternity’, 52–61.
52 Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, ‘Guerrilla Agriculture?’, 725–45.
53 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 George Holmes, ‘Protection, Politics and Protest: Understanding Resistance to Conservation’, Conservation and Society 5, no. 2 (2007): 184–201.
57 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
58 Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson, ‘Geographies of the Future: Prefigurative Politics’, Progress in Human Geography (2020): 0309132520926569.
59 Jeffrey and Dyson, ‘Geographies of the Future’.
60 Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, ‘Guerrilla Agriculture?’, 725–45.
61 O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China.
62 O’Brien, ‘Rightful Resistance Revisited’, 1051–62.
63 Ibid.
64 Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, ‘Guerrilla Agriculture?’, 725–45.
65 Nilsen and Roy, New Subaltern Politics; Chandra, ‘Rethinking Subaltern Resistance’, 563–73.
66 O’Brien, ‘Rightful Resistance Revisited’, 1051–62.
67 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Eva Davidsdottir
Eva D. Davidsdottir is a PhD fellow at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, currently pursuing a degree in environment and development studies at Noragric. Her academic background is social anthropology and development studies, and her current work is within the field of political ecology. Her research interests include the politics of forest governance, indigenous rights, environmental policy, conflicts and resistance related to land-use changes and green grabbing. More specifically, her work examines how state-led afforestation projects interplay with Adivasi rights in rural India, and explores the linkages between deforestation and land restoration.