Abstract

"Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, the book, Resistance as Negotiation: Making States and Tribes in the Margins of Modern India draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India.

The author demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-à-vis negotiations with the modern state, rather than its negation, over the past two centuries. How certain people and places came to be seen as "tribal" in modern India is, therefore, tied intimately to how "tribal" subjects remade their customs and community in the course of negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states. Ultimately, the empirical material unearthed in this book requires rethinking and rewriting the political history of modern India from its "tribal" margins.

Speaker

Uday Chandra

Uday Chandra is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University, Qatar. He received his B.A. in economics from Grinnell College and his PhD in political science from Yale University in 2013. He received the 2013 Sardar Patel Award for writing the best dissertation in a US university on any aspect of modern South Asia. Before coming to Doha, he held a prestigious research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. Uday's research lies at the intersection between critical agrarian studies, political anthropology, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies. His research has focused on caste, tribe, and the state in modern India as well as indigeneity and mobility in a broader comparative postcolonial canvas.

Uday's work has been published in the Law & Society Review, Social Movement Studies, New Political Science, Critical Sociology, The Journal of Contemporary Asia, Contemporary South Asia, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, and Modern Asian Studies. He has co-edited volumes and journal issues on self-making in modern South Asia, subaltern politics and the state in modern India, caste relations in eastern India, social movements across rural India today, and transnational circularities across the Indian Ocean.

Chair

Kriti Kapila

Kriti Kapila is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Law at King's India Institute and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She is currently on sabbatical as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2023-24). She is Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris and was previously Visiting Professor at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale at the College de France (January - June 2022). Kriti did her PhD at the London School of Economics and her master's at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Prior to working at King's, she held a Senior Research Associate position at the Institute of Global Health, University College London, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Kriti chairs the Society for Ethnographic Theory.

She is the author of Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India (HAU Books, Chicago, 2022) and has written extensively on the politics of recognition and indigeneity. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the anthropology of ancient DNA and genomic medicine in India. Her new research focuses on digital statemaking in India in the wake of biometrics (Aadhaar).