Abstract
‘How it becomes possible for subaltern groups to engage in … acts of citizenship (p. 22)?’ ‘What changes can they hope to bring through collective action (p. xv)?’ These key concerns are examined in this excellent work through a rigorous account of adivasi mobilisation in western Madhya Pradesh. It does so by conceptualising ‘how subalternity is both constituted and contested in and through state-society relations (p. 16).’ Simply put, it unravels how the ‘complex processes of negotiation, contestation and struggle animate a contentious dialectic of power and resistance that is integral to shaping the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India (p. 4).’
It tracks the mobilisation and organising work of two grassroots movements, Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) and Adivasi Mukti Sangathan (AMS) that worked in Alirajpur, Khargone and Badwani districts in the 1980s and 1990s. These movements worked on adivasi grievances related to everyday interactions with the local state and livelihood issues revolving around land and forest rights. This study is based on collaborative research with KMCS and AMS activists. The results of using this method are evident in the evocative, politically nuanced and textured oral accounts in this ethnography that is deeply informed by history.
Theoretically, it challenges Partha Chatterjee’s conceptualisation of distance between the subaltern groups and the state, and civil versus political society, which has received much scholarly attention of late, by showing succinctly that subaltern groups have always appropriated dominant idioms of citizenship and inflected them with insurgent meanings. Further, it problematises the Foucauldian notion of disaggregated state, to make a compelling argument for a ‘patterned working of the institutional modalities of the state across time in relation to the power of the social forces that act in it and through it (p. 16).’ It deploys a Gramscian analysis to map hegemonic formations of the state through the dialectic of forces that enable as well as put constraints on what subaltern groups can hope to achieve by collective action.
The book has a two-part structure. The first part, ‘Subalternity’, tracks the historical formation of Bhil subalternity and its persistence after independence (chapters 2–4). The first ethnographic chapter (chapter 2) explores how subalternity is constituted among the Bhils through ‘everyday tyranny’ as mediated through coercive internal power relations dominated by low-ranking state officials—forest guards and revenue officials—and village headmen, and as embedded in the wider culture of caste ideology that designates the adivasi as inferior. These lead to the formation of ‘local rationalities’ of deference and acquiescence, grounded in fear and resignation.
The next chapter analyses the historical roots of Bhil subalternity spanning a period between 1818–1940s, focusing on how the formation of the colonial state space was steadily accompanied by their increasing disenfranchisement and dispossession. This period eventually altered the terms of their integration into the regional political economy leading to a crystallisation of Bhil subalternity. Chapter 4 brilliantly captures adivasi responses to the emerging sovereign state in order to negotiate their political position within it by invoking various moral economies of rule, evolving idioms that justified their actions and approaching the state as a disaggregated entity. It further shows how independence led to reproduction of asymmetrical power relations.
The second part of the book, ‘Citizenship’, focuses on political mobilisation by KMCS and AMS to democratise local state-society relations as the state sought to sustain the reproduction of existing hegemony. Chapter 5 focuses on the political and affective engagements between middle-class activists and the Bhils that lead to a weakening of the durability of everyday tyranny and spawned the idea that they can also have ‘the right to have rights’ (p. 134). It shows with great subtlety the emotional and affective transformations that accompany such an ability, marking a veritable shift from ‘(in the beginning,) the chaprasi (peon) himself would scare us’ (p. 149) to ‘the fears have gone away’ (p. 133). The analysis of engagements of KMCS and AMS along the axes of law, civil society and citizenship delve deeper in the next chapter. The Bhil activists in their political practices hold the state and its authorities accountable to law, assert themselves as rights-bearing groups, and inflect the idioms of citizenship and their justice claims with insurgent meanings, such as by their claims for citizenship as centred on adivasi self-rule and resource control.
Chapter 7 maps the patterned working of the state focusing on the use of force on subaltern groups to sustain a particular hegemonic formation and its asymmetries. The state deploys routine coercion—threats, rumours and intimidation—to discourage collective action and more radical acts such as mass arrests and burning down property.
The concluding chapter sets to do an unusual political task—to reflect on the ways that could sunder sedimented power of the dominant groups and lead towards transformative political possibilities. It offers Andre Gorz’s idea of ‘non-reformist reform’—i.e. an agenda of reforms that seeks to stimulate ‘structures of popular power’ by not merely fighting for democratic rights, but also suitably aligning with movement networks and left electoral politics in advancing a counter-hegemonic project.
As such, it is an authoritative work that addresses issues of subalternity, social movements and citizenship in advancing a dynamic and lucid Gramscian account of hegemony as a process. Its engagements with feminist and queer readings on emotions enables it to ground a well-rounded analysis on subjectivities, which has unfortunately not received the kind of attention that it must in struggles over nature. I wish the book would have discussed briefly, if and how, recent struggles over wages and forest rights (discussed in Chapter 5 and 6), have shaped adivasi class-consciousness and subalternity.
It is a must-read book for students interested in the adivasi situation, subaltern history and politics, and social movements, and a fine work of anthropology to read to learn about writing a theoretically engaged ethnography.