The American Indian Adivasi: Writing Adivasi Indigeneity in Ranendra’s Lords of the Global Village

Abstract

Marginal communities in India have often claimed indigeneity in contests over rights to the environment. While the significance of these claims has been analyzed in the context of political identity formation, social movements, and transnational activism, the role of vernacular literature in constructing indigeneity has not received much attention. In this paper, I analyze a contemporary Hindi novel Lords of the Global Village (Global gamv ke devta) within the context of this broader discussion of the meanings of indigeneity in India. The novel, set in the east Indian state of Jharkhand, describes how the Asur, categorized as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) by the government of India, resist the takeover of their lands for bauxite mining. The distinctive feature of the novel is that it describes metropolitan exploitation of the region by invoking the history of displacement of American Indian communities in the Americas. What does this invocation of settler colonial history signal in the postcolonial Indian context? I argue that the novel attempts to craft indigeneity as a far more polyvalent concept than official discourse has allowed.

Keywords:

• Hindi literature
• Adivasi
• American Indian
• indigeneity
• nature
• ecology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Joya John is currently Assistant Professor of Literature at Krea University. She has earned a PhD, from the University of Chicago. Her research has so far focused on issues of environment and ecology in Indian fiction. She holds both Master’s and MPhil degrees in English Literary Studies from Delhi University.

Notes

1 Emphasis mine. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

2 It is important to note regional, caste, and community affiliations given that the state of Jharkhand was constituted following the ethnicization of both Adivasi indigeneity and ‘legitimate’ non-Adivasis (sadan) in the state. Ranendra is non-Adivasi and originally from the neighbouring state of Bihar. He is a prominent figure in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, and has earned recognition for his contribution to the Adivasi cultural revival. He has two very successful novels and a collection each of poems and short stories to his credit. He has also co-edited a four-volume Jharkhand encyclopaedia (Ranendra and Sudhir 2008). Ranendra’s novel Global gaon ke devta, published in 2010, has become hugely popular and is in its 4^th print edition. It has been translated into English as Lords of the Global Village (2017).

3 In 1975, the Government of India initiated a separate category called Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) and declared 52 such tribes to belong to this category. In 1993, it added an additional 23 groups to the category, making it a total of 75 PVTGs out of 705 Scheduled Tribes, spread over 17 states and one Union Territory (UT) according to the 2011 census. The criteria for being included in this group included a pre-agricultural system of existence, the practice of hunting and gathering, zero or negative population growth, extremely low level of literacy in comparison with other tribal groups. Inclusion in this category is based on the recommendation of various state governments.

4 However, a discourse of “internal colonialism” has existed in the Indian context. Comparisons with the American Indian case can be traced in the political rhetoric of Jharkhand from at least the early 1980s. An early article published in Frontier magazine in April 1982, by A.K. Roy, drew attention to the economic processes of underdevelopment in Jharkhand, a term he characterized as “internal colonialism” (Roy 2003, n.p.). These were, however, often subsumed under the movement for an autonomous state of Jharkhand (Munda and Mullick 2003).

5 Mary Louise Pratt (2007) has pointed out that the generic descriptors used to refer to Indigenous peoples–Indigenous, native, aboriginal, first nations––all refer etymologically to priority in time and place. They denote “those who were here (or there) first, that is, before someone else who came ‘after’” (398).

6 A controversial study conducted by the UN special rapporteur Miquel Alfonso Martinez (1999) concluded that various groups in Africa and Asia could not claim the status of “Indigenous” peoples. Martinez points to the distinction between the historical trajectories of, on the one hand “territorial expansion by indigenous nations into adjacent areas,” and “organized colonization, by European powers, of people inhabiting, since time immemorial, territories on other continents” (13). Martinez suggested that cases relating to the continents of Asia and Africa should be handled by the Working Group on Minorities, insisting on a clear demarcation between national and ethnic minorities and Indigenous peoples.

7 The prominent anthropologist B. K. Roy (1998) was the first scholar to challenge the usage of the term Indigenous peoples in India. Burman took note of a World Bank document in which India’s Scheduled Tribes were termed “Indigenous peoples.” This, he argued, was an illegitimate imposition and could only be settled internally thorough debate in India. His critique extended to other international bodies, above all, to the United Nations’ Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which, according to him, in a similarly light-handed manner designated the Scheduled Tribes as “Indigenous.”

8 In India, the Census of 1931, conducted under the direction of J. H. Hutton, drew up the first comprehensive list of tribes, which constitutes the basis of the list of Scheduled Tribes still in use under the Constitution of India.

9 Byrd and Rothberg (2011, 4) have previously talked about the “uncompleted dialogue between postcolonial and indigenous perspectives.” However, they focus on subalternity as an index of the incommensurability of the postcolonial subject with forms of liberal citizenship. This limits their analysis of discourses of indigeneity in India, as I will show.

10 The claim for a tribal majority state of Jharkhand was made in the 1930s and had waxed and waned for many decades before being brutally crushed in the mid-seventies (Munda and Mullick 2003). It was only with the reinvention of the movement that the State of Jharkhand was finally carved out of the states of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha.

11 This reference to the song by Chief Seattle most probably refers to the famous speech made by him to the first governor of Washington Territory Isaac Ingalls Stevens. It was first published in 1887 by a pioneer who claimed he had heard Seattle deliver it in the 1850s. The speech itself went on to become an example of ecological stewardship in the environmental movement. Here, interestingly, the novel dates the song to c. 1686, which is factually incorrect since Chief Seattle is documented as being born in c. 1786.

12 The Jadura and Jhoomar are both tribal dances. The Jadura is performed in the season between the Karam and Sarhul festivals.

13 Mahadeva (Great God) refers to Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism.