"Historical anthropologists of modern India such as Bernard Cohn (1987), Arjun Appadurai (1993), and Nicholas Dirks (2001) have argued forcefully that the modern articulation of caste is a "state effect" (Mitchell 1991) insofar as this social institution came to be revived and reproduced by the colonial state via its classificatory and enumerative policies. Yet this colonialism-centered perspective, though useful in many senses, obscures the everyday socio-cultural processes by which the colonized organized themselves under colonial overlordship. Insofar as caste is a system of organizing labor on the basis of a hierarchical social logic, it is important to understand how distinctive "regional modernities" (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003) were built, quite literally, on the backs of laboring groups assigned the lowest ritual and socioeconomic status in these new regions.

This paper uncovers a "hidden" history of one such laboring group in nineteenth-century Bengal, who appear in the colonial archives as Kols, despised in caste terms by the Hindu bhadralok yet categorized subsequently via ethnological accounts as "tribes." The Kols, sometimes known as Dhangars, appear in the colonial record from the time they helped build the imperial capital of Calcutta as migrants the neighboring forest highlands of Chotanagpur in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Decried as dirty or impure but valued for their ability to perform hard physical labor, the Kols served as construction workers as well as sweepers and cleaners in Calcutta. By the middle of the century, the colonial archives suggest that the Kols had turned coolies for the indigo and tea plantations of modern Bengal. In the plantation economy, the lowly Kols, men and women alike, performed hard agricultural labors that other caste groups were deemed incapable of. Subsequently, as land had to be reclaimed and forests cleared in the Sunderban delta, the Kols were called upon to alter the natural and human ecology of the area. Even as they were classified as "tribes" by anthropologist-administrators in Chotanagpur, therefore, the Kols became the laboring caste par excellence in modern Bengal. The sociocultural processes by which this occurred have, nonetheless, been hidden from the gaze of later historians raised on the venerable caste/tribe dichotomy in Indian sociology. This paper offers a preliminary sketch of this hidden history of labor, caste, and subjecthood on which Bengali regional modernity came to rest by the end of the nineteenth century and which continues to pervade the postcolonial present. "

""How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal, and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their political discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi  to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for these activists?

To answer these interrelated questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand, formerly south Bihar. In these self-narratives, I focus on the ways in which these middle-class activists have crafted their political ethics with reference to “indigenous communities” in India and beyond. I argue that “indigeneity” functions in Jharkhandi activist discourses as a marker of a distinctive post-materialist turn in bourgeois politics. The defense of the indigenous or primitive speaks to deep-seated existential crises among bourgeois activists, who seek to simultaneously transcend the modern domains of state and capital as well as locate an authentic space of political ethics and critique in imagined adivasi collectivities. 

By acting as patrons of “primitive” peoples  who purportedly avoid lying, the state, and the money economy, indigeneity activists assume vanguardist roles in ways that satisfy, firstly, the bourgeois critique of electoral democracy in post-Mandal India and, secondly, the post-Naxalbari desire for an independent left outside the existing communist party alternatives. These twin sources of the Jharkhandi activist’s self may be often complementary, but, at the same time, there are very real tensions between them. As the three activist tales in this paper demonstrate, independent left activists, for example, often takes bourgeois politics in contemporary India as their ideological point of departure; the bourgeois celebration of the individual is, similarly, at odds with the leftist quest for post-capitalist collectivities. Nonetheless, these tensions come to the fore most clearly when we consider the limited popular support enjoyed by these activists, especially when ordinary adivasi men and women refuse to assume what Michel Rolph-Trouillot (2003) famously called the “savage slot.” 

This kind of rejection, in fact, further fuels the existential crises that propel indigeneity activism in Jharkhand today insofar as it prompts the unending bourgeois search for a “purer,” more ethical self that claims to be the antithesis of politics yet aspires to a total politics that suffuses every individual belief, act, and idiosyncrasy. This paper thus sheds light on the politics of the anti-political and the modernity of anti-modernism in contemporary India. ""

"""Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of theoretical and empirical knowledge that draws on Edward Said's critique of Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been rather limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Eurocentric perspectives on ex-colonial territories. Contemporary understandings of the state and democracy remain trapped in outdated Eurocentric theory that sheds scarcely any light on postcolonial realities. Mass democracy in India remains a puzzle for political scientists today much as it did for their predecessors n the '50s and '60s Likewise, recent scholarship on civil wars and ethnic conflict has renewed older colonial stereotypes of opportunistic native rebels and primordial divisions in non-Western societies. From the top-down perspective of mainstream US political science, just as for former colonial rulers, rebels and ethnic divides are merely impediments to state-building and economic growth.

The case for a postcolonial approach to the study of politics is thus stronger than ever before. A postcolonial approach can take many forms: critiques of existing Eurocentric theories of comparative politics; bottom-up ethnographic and historical understandings of politics in particular contexts; re-evaluations of commonplace political concepts such as the state, democracy, nationalism, and war in the light of different non-Western experiences. Such an approach calls for a sustained engagement with specific non-Western contexts as well as an openness to anthropological, historical, and area studies knowledge about them. In the same vein, it calls for "provincializing Europe," as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued recently, in order to avoid treating European experiences as universals. These tasks are simultaneously theoretical and empirical as well as intellectual and practical. As such, they supplement ongoing efforts within the United States and Europe to produce critical scholarship on racial, gender, and sexual minorities, inequalities of class and status, and the interpenetration of power and knowledge in mainstream political science. A postcolonial approach is thus a radical endeavor that seeks to challenge mainstream knowledge on non-Western societies via sustained engagements with them. """

"""Liberalism is widely regarded as a modern intellectual tradition that defends the rights and freedoms of autonomous individuals. Yet, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, liberal theorists and policymakers have struggled to defend the rights and freedoms of political subjects whom they regard as “primitive,” “backward,” or in more politically-correct terms, “indigenous” (Pagden 1982; Damodaran 2006b; Viswanathan 2006; Jung 2008). Liberalism thus recurrently encounters its primitive other, a face-off that gives rise to a peculiar set of dilemmas and contradictions for political theory, policy, and practice in colonial and postcolonial contexts (Ivison 2002; Ivison et al 2000; Banerjee 2006; Ghosh 2006). In what ways can postcolonial law rid itself of its colonial baggage? How can the ideal of universal liberal citizenship overcome paternalistic notions of protection? How might “primitive” subjects become full and equal citizens in postcolonial societies?

To explore these dilemmas and contradictions, I study the intellectual trajectory of “primitivism” in India from the construction of so-called tribal areas in the 1870s to legal debates and official reports on tribal rights in contemporary India. As such, this paper has two principal aims: firstly, to read closely the legal provisions justifying colonial and postcolonial rule over tribal populations in order to highlight the ambiguities and paradoxes of primitivism as an ideology of rule in India, and secondly, to understand these legal texts in their proper intellectual and political contexts in order to develop an historically-inflected understanding of the continuing tension between the constitutional ideal of liberal citizenship and the disturbing reality of tribal subjecthood produced by colonial and postcolonial states in India. In doing so, I seek to put into conversation the small but influential literature on liberalism and modern empire with the voluminous writings on colonial anthropology and administration in British India.

My approach in this paper may be termed interpretive or hermeneutical. I read primary legal texts closely with particular attention to continuities and shifts in their languages and concepts. Furthermore, I situate these texts in their historical contexts in order to better appreciate how the hermeneutics of these texts share a two-way relationship with real-world policy and practice. For the colonial period, I focus on the Scheduled Districts Act (1874), selected administrative and missionary writings on tribal areas and peoples, and extracts from colonial constitutions and commissioned reports. For the postcolonial period, I study the debates over the Constitution of India and its provisions for scheduled tribes, key legislation and court decisions on tribal rights and livelihoods, and reports on tribal development from the 1960s onwards. Lastly, I invoke secondary sources by historians, political theorists, and anthropologists that explore the historical relationship between liberalism and modern empire as well as ideologies of rule that have used anthropological knowledge to justify their raison d’êtres."""

Adivasis are typically viewed by scholars, activists, and policymakers alike as primitive subjects trapped within modern state imaginaries. Adivasi politics, therefore, is understood vis-a-vis the dramaturgy of postcolonial tragedy. Such an understanding, I argue, denies any meaningful agency to adivasis, and prevents an exploration of the rich, multi-layered performances of resistance through which adivasi subject-formation is successfully negotiated in postcolonial India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Jharkhand, this paper probes into the myriad tropes and strategies by which the modes, mechanisms, and meanings of modern state power have been reworked and resisted in two apparently opposed moments of resistance: the "peaceful" Koel-Karo anti-dam movement of the 1980s and the ongoing "violent" Maoist movement. In doing so, I show how the aesthetics of power are tied inextricably, albeit ironically, to the ethics of subaltern resistance, each acting and reacting upon the other to define the potentialities of and proscriptions on political expression in the margins of the postcolony.

""Opposing the neoliberal rhetoric of a shining middle-class India, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has, since 2004, called for a New Democratic Revolution. Indian Maoists dismiss parliamentary democracy as a sham insofar as it fails to address the concerns and aspirations of the majority of its citizens, nearly four-fifths of whom live below two dollars a day. In their party programme, Maoists characterize the postcolonial Indian state as ‘reactionary’ and ‘autocratic’ and seek a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ to overthrow ‘imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism’ via an armed revolutionary struggle. The CPI (Maoist) politburo, which constitutes its ideological leadership, is thus supported by an underground People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The party’s long-term objective is to establish a ‘people’s democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat’ that will ‘guarantee real democracy for the vast majority of people while exercising dictatorship over a tiny minority of exploiters’.

The CPI (Maoist) is active mostly in eastern and central India, where human development levels rank among the lowest in the world, forest cover and rugged terrain facilitate guerrilla tactics and protracted low-intensity insurgency, and tribal and lower caste groups are preponderant. According to the Indian prime minister, Maoist rebels pose the greatest internal security threat to India since independence. In reality, however, Maoist cadres are estimated to be anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 in a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, though this number does not include sympathizers and non-combatants. These thinly-spread cadres are concentrated chiefly in what journalists, policymakers, and scholars call the Red Corridor, running from the Nepalese border through the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh. In these areas, regular elections are held, state and non-governmental organizations routinely participate in rural development, and state police and forest officials coexist with armed rebels and their rural supporters. Since 2005-06, the state has deployed paramilitaries to supplement state police forces in combating Maoist guerillas, which has intensified state-sponsored violence and led to widespread human rights abuses, yet it has been incapable of establishing anything akin to a monopoly of legitimate violence. Shared sovereignty is thus the norm, not the exception, as in other insurgent zones in India such as Kashmir and the northeastern frontier. This state of affairs also suggests that the everyday realities of Indian Maoism are somewhat different from its ideological self-image as a vanguardist revolutionary movement.""

ISS offers a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when activists pretend to know what is best for subordinated adivasi populations. Alpa Shah demonstrates persuasively that the best antidote to misguided activism is a critical ethnographic understanding of the joys and sorrows, trials and tribulations, aims and aspirations of those poorest individuals and groups whose voices rarely get heard in academic and policy circles. Such a close-to-the-ground understanding of subaltern politics paves the way for a truly radical politics that seeks to transform the structures of power and profit that entrap adivasis in India today.

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
—Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)

Echoing Goldsmith’s 18th-century lament on the ills of modern industrial society, noneconomists frequently bemoan and berate modern economics’ neglect of a wide range of ethical concerns. This criticism is bolstered by the evidence that a standard microeconomics text for undergraduates such as Hal Varian’s book does not even use the word “ethics” anywhere. Even when “bads” are discussed, they are defined as commodities that the “consumer doesn’t like” (Varian 1996: 41). Similarly, utility is interpreted as a “way to describe [consumer] preferences” (Varian 1996: 54).

These instances of discord between ethics and economics, however, obscure the fact that there exists a multifaceted historical relationship between ethical and economic ideas. Aristotelian ideas of eudaimonia (human flourishing) and justice in economic activities dominated the Western intellectual environment until the Enlightenment, stressing the complementarities between the ethical and economic realms. Enlightenment scholars, notably Adam Smith, sought to supplant the old Aristotelian paradigm with a new relationship between ethics and economics. However, the 20th-century ascendancy of neoclassical economics, with its penchant for mathematical models and “scientific” tools, has meant the neglect of both Aristotelian and Smithian ethics. Although Amartya Sen’s ethical
concerns have reintroduced Aristotelian ideas into modern economics without discarding basic Smithian values, Sen’s challenge to neoclassical thinking may itself be inadequate in the contemporary context. This paper analyzes the linkages between ethics and economics in the writings of Aristotle, Smith and Sen, and then provides an alternative paradigm for addressing ethical or normative concerns within contemporary economics."