Land, Labour, Indigeneity and Class: An Enquiry Into Agrarian Transition Among Adivasis in India

Presenter:

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Abstract

Scheduled tribes have suffered disproportionately the impact of displacement due to developmentalist projects promoted by the post-colonial Indian state. While constituting 8.6% of India’s population,they comprise more than 50 percent of those uprooted from their habitat since independence. Many tribes, in response, have used the language of indigeneity and represented an authentic intimate relationship with their natural surroundings to claim legitimacy over their territory, identifying themselves as Adivasis meaning original inhabitant of land. However, the ongoing alienation from land has intensified a process of ‘de-territorialistation’ among the Adivasis, who now form a disproportionately large percentage of both migrant labour and casual wage labour populations, seeking employment in the urban or non-farm economy, engaged in poorly paid low skill work. India’s industries have been incapable to absorb the labour force ‘freed’ from means of production, resulting in most landless or marginal adivasi farmers joining the ‘classes of labour’ who depend on the sale of their labour power in the informal economy under precarious conditions to reproduce themselves. This paper discusses the salient features of such agrarian transition faced by the adivasis in India under a neoliberal regime in the past three decades. It argues, such a transition requires the adivasis now to defend both territorial and labour rights, therefore demanding new tools of struggle, new organizing principles and broader solidarities beyond ethnic lines. In such an imagination of adivasi politics, class politics will not replace ethnic politics but open up spaces where they constitute each other.