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South Indian Christians trace their history to the ministry of the Apostle Thomas in modern-day Kerala and in Mylapore. Orthodox Christianity in South India has most complex history. Members are native to Kerala; yet most carry on the legacies of ancestors who were loyal to either the Patriarchs in Persia and Constantinople or the Popes in Rome. Under these external ties lie the forces of caste identity and rivalries among influential families. Socio-religious customs of varna, avarna and jāti still affect society, despite opposition from religious groups. Since 2014, the fundamentalist ideology of one nation, one religion, one language, one people and one culture, forced dissidents and minorities to blend in. While Christianity in South India is an urban phenomenon, it has not spread among the Adivasis (‘original inhabitants’) of South India, who live in tune with the nature surrounding them. In fact, most South Indians call themselves Hindus; they may belong to either philosophical or popular Hinduism, each consisting of numerous subgroups. Theological education is still offered through several outlets; however, despite the history and presence of Christianity, many Christians have yet to engage fully with the intellectual and spiritual heritage of South India.

Chapter two enquires into the contrasting narratives of the Nilgiri landscape and the people inhabiting it. It discusses the projections of romantic and progressive ideals onto the mountain landscapes and the identification of these landscapes with familiar European environments in idealised tropes. By following the many ethnographic and anthropological studies of the Toda and the Badaga communities over time, the chapter enquires into the changing narratives, from romantic ideas about the ‘herders’ living in an organic relationship with nature to the perceived threat of wilderness in people lacking civilisation and self-control. This shift in the depiction of people and places in the Nilgiri Hills is discussed in view of increasingly utilitarian visions among the British administration for the transformation of the place into the British colonial economy and rule. Within this vision, the two communities that received the most attention—the Toda and the Badaga—were placed at opposite ends of development. Locating the discussion of the Nilgiris in the historiography of Adivasi communities in India, the chapter discusses how the Toda were deemed to belong to an undeveloped past and, up to the mid-19th century, the Badaga were seen as the entrepreneurial cultivator who would carry progress into agriculture.

The Introduction lays out the central themes of the book. It argues that the Dhanka, like other tribal communities in India, must undertake a great deal of imaginative work to occupy the tribal role through which they are recognized as worthy and needy of affirmative action benefits. One of the ways in which the Dhanka perform this balancing act is by narrating tribal-ness or “adivasi-ness” in the past tense through the phrase “We were adivasis.” The assertion that “we were adivasis” allows the Dhanka to both index their adivasi-nessand distance themselves from the stigma of primitivity or militancy by placing this quality of tribal-ness in the past. Understanding this basic Dhanka claim illuminates why they undertake the particular kinds of identity-building efforts that they have embraced in recent years, particularly their annual collective weddings known as samuhikvivahasammelan, Dhanka men and women must embrace stigma and backwardness in order to avail themselves of the benefits of ST identity, which includes the ability to enact the marriage and family practices of other, non-tribal middle-class Hindus; thus, their practices of collective aspiration have deeply gendered effects. The Introduction also introduces the Shiv Nagar Basti, a slum area in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Chapter two presents the ethnographic background and describes the region of fieldwork, the northern Nilgiris in south India. The paragraphs outline the social patterns of the area and in particular the relationships among the Jēnu Kuṟumba, the village and the state. The chapter also provides a brief political history of that area. In addition, it presents the ethnographic features of the Jēnu Kuṟumba moral community, such as the patterns of social and political relationships, the social, cultural and religious organisation and it portraits the basic aspects of Jēnu Kuṟumba ontology and shamanism.

Chapter six examines (in an excursus) the everyday politics of modern state governmentality and the infrapolitics of the Jēnu Kuṟumba. It details the Jēnu Kuṟumba practice of everyday politics, as motivated by their indigenous ethical ‘tribal view’. The chapter shows how the communitarian world-view articulated by the ‘tribal view’ offers a conceptual basis for cultural resistance in the sense that the tribal view constitutes specific forms of infrapolitical strategies vis-a-vis the modern state of Tamil Nadu. It involves infrapolitical strategies such as avoidance of the state and its agents, labour boycott, but also theft and narrative strategies to strengthen the subaltern Adivasi identity. Thus the ‘tribal view’ represents a moral ontology that grounds the ethical self-understanding of the people. It is thus constitutive of the Jēnu Kuṟumba subaltern infrapolitical politics.

The Indian subcontinent has witnessed unprecedented change in land-use pattern during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries marked by the intensification of agriculture, in turn adversely impacting forest and water bodies. The early post-colonial period, that is 1955–75, was a crucial phase in this regard but is understudied. Hill-communities in western India took to settled agriculture marking a distinct patch of deforestation. This reconstruction of the deforestation in Mewas chieftaincies in and around the Narmada valley of present-day Maharashtra argues that the complex process was infused by external factors including political and legal elements at the institutional level spanning the colonial and the postcolonial periods respectively. Equally vital were internal factors like sociocultural and demographical changes traversing nearly a century that caused drastic transformation of the local inhabitants’ relation with the surrounding forest. The issue of formal land titles that arose as a result remains unresolved nearly four decades later.

This chapter provides a background to some of the challenges faced by the Indian State in its attempt to remain a sovereign nation in matters related to the digital. It specifically highlights the IP challenges that it faces, and also illustrates Indian successes in the digital realm. Simultaneously, it highlights the fact that poverty, the agrarian crisis, Maoism, and other ruptures in Indian society cannot be wished away or solved with more injections of technology and the digital. The chapter attempts to ground India’s tryst with the digital within its local politics and geopolitical compulsions, but also importantly against its contemporary political economy and reality of uneven development. It argues that India’s digital future, to an extent, will depend on how best it invests in bridging other divides in the society.

Nandini Sundar examines the conditions and discursive strategies utilized by the BJP to contribute to building an extensive Adivasi (tribal) voter base that continues to support the BJP despite the party’s alignment with industrialists who displace rural and tribal communities, and whose ruling ideology marginalizes and devalues Adivasis. Narendra Modi’s popularity is no more central to this question than in discussions that revolve around the fatal attraction of the BJP holds to Adivasis and Dalits. Why do Adivasis vote in such large numbers for a party which is clearly aligned with the industrialists who want to displace them; why do Dalits align with a party whose ruling ideology is so clearly holds them in contempt? Sundar analyzes several strategies of incorporating Adivasis into the Hindu nation: Sanskritization, modernization (in the form of schooling), the (anti-Christian) conversion debate, service work, and mass violence and small-scale incidents.

Angana P. Chatterji excavates the contemporaneous practices of Hindu majoritarianism in Uttar Pradesh surrounding the 2014 elections. This chapter elaborates on the emergent relations between Hindu cultural dominance and nationalist Hinduism that induce and deepen cultural anxiety, xenophobia, misogyny, as well as hate and violence. This chapter also details select examples of actions to discipline and terrorize religious minority/ othered subjects (including Adivasis and Dalits) undertaken by Sangh Parivar organizations in Uttar Pradesh between January 2014 and September 2018, and those resultant from the undercurrent of hate and estrangement fostered by the majoritarian culture at large. These events pertain to the Ayodhya campaign, forcible conversions to Hinduism, framing ‘love jihad’, opposing reservations and cattle slaughter, and the promotion of hate speech. The everyday and episodic targeting of vulnerable communities is supported by the deeply rooted inequities of caste, class, and hetero/ normative gender, and such targeting, the chapter argues, strengthens cultures of violence and facilitates governance through fear.