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Negotiating Identities: The Subaltern in Scheduled Areas

Presenter:

· Meenakshi Nair Ambujam Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland)

Timeslot:

07/26 | 17:50-18:10 UTC+2/CEST

Abstract

Subaltern Studies had much to do with challenging not only the opposition of the subaltern against the popular, but also demonstrating how populations relegated to the margins had constituted an ‘autonomous realm’ through the production of their histories. By doing so, the Subaltern School produced narratives that ruptured and complicated established histories that were inherently top-down. However, as critics of the Subaltern School have pointed out, one of the major lacunae has been the use of the category of the subaltern itself, often presenting a rather homogenized interpretation of the term. This paper seeks to problematize the category of the subaltern by focusing on how Dalits and Adivasis negotiate identities and relationships in Fifth Schedule Areas of India in their quest for land. Fifth Schedule Areas are specific territories of India which are marked as ‘tribal’ or ‘adivasi’, where as per the Constitution and state legislation, land cannot be sold, bought or transferred to non-tribals, which also includes Dalits. Drawing on 13 months of fieldwork in Telangana, I explore what it means to be Dalit in Adivasi spaces, how Dalits’ claims to land and forest rights tend to be—more often than not—denied in these regions, and how this affects overarching narratives of Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi. Specifically, this paper asks, what quality does subalternity take in such spaces, and who becomes subaltern? While Spivak’s provocative article raised questions of ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, who becomes subaltern in Scheduled Areas and who is conceived as being outside spaces of institutional and social power in the Gramscian sense of the term becomes important to revisit.