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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.

The last chapter expands the scope of the ethnographic account to reflect on aspiration and affirmative action as important sites of political inquiry in the contemporary world. Focusing on the creativity of subaltern citizenship, it argues that such creativity emerges because of, not in spite of, proximity to those state institutions from which subalterneity is often seen as an exclusion. Looking at struggles for inclusion in the Scheduled Tribe category in Rajasthan and new uses of the Right to Information Act, the conclusion proposes that the ongoing work of feminist ethnography demands that we attend to how projects for social uplift can be both collective and differentially experienced based on axes of gender, age, and religious devotion.

In recent years, India has seen a viral increase in the number of state-recognized Kattunayaka, the official name of the foragers at the heart of this ethnography. Their ethnonym is included in the Constitution list of “Scheduled Tribes” guiding India’s distributive justice system. Ethnography of claims of Kattunayaka identity shows the political fallout from cross-scalar spillage in understanding plural life. This chapter calls attention to scalar blindness in broader discussions of indigeneity and multiculturalism, with emphasis on India. It elucidates the broader relevance of an anthropological distinction that emerges from the book’s overall ethnography: a contrast between a pluripresent and an imagined community.

The political scene of West Bengal has witnessed a distinct wave of Paribartan (change) since the closing period of the last decade. Beginning with the 15th Lok Sabha Election 2009 followed by the state Assembly Election in 2011, the gradual ascendance of the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) in the political centre stage of West Bengal has ended the more than thirty years of continued rule of the Left Front (LF) spearheaded by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This chapter attempts to analyse the socio-political determinants of such a turnaround, exploring the social base of the LF and scrutinizing the policies of the LF government. The analysis shows that the LF, increasingly detached from its ideological standpoint, has undertaken certain policies which have contributed to the erosion of its much proclaimed social constituency. Finally, an effort has been made to locate the possible implications and concerns for democracy and democratic institutions in India.

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.