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This chapter focuses on the conversion of āvarnas in India. Some communities have seemed much more open to the Gospel and more susceptible to turning to the Christian faith than others. Mass conversions occurred mainly among āvarna and adivāsi peoples. The terms āvarna and adivāsi are Brahmanical, or Sanskriti, categories of analysis. As such, they have been applied to peoples that, in terms of ritual pollution, lie outside the bounds of ritual purity as defined within varnāshramadharma or as belonging to Sanskriti.

From the mid-19th century onwards, indigenously led conversion movements drew scores of separate tribal (adivāsi) peoples toward Christian faith in all of the eastern mountain frontiers. It is significant that, as a consequence, adivāsi populations in the seven states that now surround Assam Valley are predominantly Christian. Moreover, modern education and literacy in Roman script has not only given them easy cultural access to all of India but to the entire anglophone world. This chapter examines the Nagas, with the hope that this can serve as a representative sample or template for the understanding of other adivāsi tribes. It also briefly summarizes how the Gospel came to other adivāsi peoples.

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.

The colonial era was a watershed in India's environmental history in a host of ways, but changes that were unleashed from the late nineteenth century onwards have to be set against a long-term backdrop. States had long assisted in and facilitated land colonization and clearance of marsh, jungle, and forest. But the scale and kinds of intervention changed markedly in the colonial period, most sharply with respect to the creation of state forests, the control of wild animals as game or vermin, and the creation of vast tracts of canal-irrigated land. The complex and interwoven tensions around these projects played out in different ways in a vast and diverse subcontinent. This chapter takes stock of these colonial changes and also traces the many dilemmas and choices in the present, arising from the multiple layers of the imperial legacy.

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.

This chapter returns to Filmistan. Ethnographic fieldwork with Vikas, who lives in a part of the grounds known as "the Village," reveals that the whole studio was built on top of a hamlet settled by members of an adivasi community, the Warlis. In its excavation of Filmistan’s tribal history, the chapter focuses on the old village temples, one of which has undergone a conversion from a site dedicated to a tribal goddess to an outpost of modern Brahminical Hinduism. Vikas himself contends that he has an ancestral claim to Filmistan. He cites not only questions of legal right but also his status as the village medium who communes with territorial deities through possession. But what would it take for the powerful interests that control the space to recognize Vikas in his patrimony? The question frames his reflections on a number of themes: on the Indian legal system as a colonial inheritance; on contact with locally emplaced deities as a source of power and affective transport in his life; and on cinema as a modern, “scientific” innovation with the capacity to produce similar effects.

This chapter takes up the history of the Warlis, a tribal (adivasi) community that stakes a claim of autochthony to parts of Maharashtra, including parts of the Mumbai (Suburban) District. Central to the exposition is a mythohistorical narrative, the “Oxhide Tale.” The tale explains the Warlis’ lot as "wild" people, jungle dwellers, as the result of a crooked legal contract that banished them, in historical times, beyond the realm of polity. The distinction between spaces of culture and of nature is a trope with a long history in India. Here, it is taken up as an organizing principle by which the state and affiliated elites have constructed tribals as people defined by a naturalized bond with the raw, kaccha space of the forest. A corollary is the visualization of this bond in terms of religious beliefs and practices that differ from those professed by caste Hindus. The chapter’s last section will take up the Maharashtra government’s reliance on state anthropology: specifically, the contribution of anthropologists to the state's generation of paperwork, and the generation by that paperwork of power effects over the tribal populations that anthropologists study.

Chapter 6 is about the tribal inhabitants of wooded areas to the west of Filmistan, including the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the Film City production facility. A series of legal arguments presented before the Bombay High Court from 1995–2003 record the state's efforts to remove adivasis from this area, a struggle in which environmentalist interests clashed with tribal-rights advocates. In the ruling handed down in 2003, the right to remain in the forest was reserved to residents who could demonstrate before the authorities that they were “bona fide tribals.” This chapter develops some propositions about the visual mediation of space. If one index of tribal authenticity is a spiritual connection to natural space, that standard has been proving hard to imagine in a pakka form that others can recognize. As an alternative, some activists have begun looking to symbols of tribal culture already in public circulation as vehicles of empowerment. One site of intervention considered here is “Warli art,” a visual idiom that has moved from ritual contexts into metropolitan and even transnational art markets. Another source of current visual tropes defining the “tribal,” to uncanny effect, is the very film industry whose facilities have overrun Warli villages.

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.

This chapter examines the role of democracy and feminism in Indian political thought based on adivasi and Dalit-bahujan discourses. It explores the question of Buddhist identity through works on Iyothee Thass and the invention of a Dalit political identity while assessing the role of labour in the inter-subjective relationships between the Brahmin master and the Dalit. It also considers the unique position of Dalit feminists in the male-dominated Dalit discourse and suggests that feminism has been the object of internal criticism for its complicity with caste hierarchies and conventional sexual norms.

This chapter takes head-on Spivak’s conceptualization of the subaltern not just as a position of ‘social, economic and political subordination’ but as one of ‘radical, and indeed an irretrievable alterity […] that has profound implications for the politics of representation’. The problem of representation, posed in this manner in postcolonial theory, not only silences the subaltern subject but disallows political voice and subjectivity that can partly be developed through projects of solidarity. The chapter recovers the figure of the adivasi — ‘the unrepresentable par excellence’ — as a political subject-agent in a number of literary texts against the preoccupation of postcolonial theory with the limits and (im)possibilities of representation. It also incorporates, in this manner, a perspective on and critique of postcolonial theory that offers ‘ironic analogies’ with the materialist approaches to subalternity offered elsewhere in the volume.

The Introduction presents the main arguments and the outline of the book. It describes why postcolonial anthropology, the study of identities, and an anthropology of ethics need another concept of reason. It reviews the different conceptions of reason that anthropologists hitherto employed and it outlines an alternative conception of rationality, namely ‘engaged practical reason’. This concept, the study argues, is more appropriate if we wish to study the ways people shape ethically motivated ways of living since it pays tribute to the many voices and practices engaged in such processes of (individual and collective) ethical self-formation. The chapter also outlines the identity politics of becoming rather than being, the notion of the ‘ethico-political’ and reviews the current debates in both postcolonial anthropology and in the anthropology of ethics. It also contains a section on the ethnographic fieldwork which led to the book and it provides an overview of the book.

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 fourth chapter traces the rise of the productivity ideal in agriculture and introduces the ‘good farmer’ of Malwa, who draws upon the scientific discourse of productivity to claim a greater share of resources from the state, and to denigrate the claims of poor, adivasi farmers to be farmers at all. When upper-caste farmers are less productive, the blame is placed on the environment, but when lower-caste farmers are less productive, the blame is placed on their (lack of) capability to understand scientific techniques to increase productivity. This is ironic because in soyabean, using scientific techniques to raise the yield of the crop on Indian farms has been a futile exercise. Rather than framing the positive contribution of soyabean as a poor farmer’s crop, since it gives average production despite adverse conditions of water and inputs, the productivity discourse promotes yield anxiety and further pushes farmers onto a technological treadmill.

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.