Threads of Indigeneity in Central India: Essays on Adivasi History and Politics

This edited collection discusses conceptual ambiguities related indigenous groups in India, known as Adivasis (original inhabitants), and focuses particularly on Central Indian indigenous groups. The chapters review and discuss colonial conceptions of primitive tribes in academic and policy literature from the West and from Indian scholars, and their continuing influence in the postcolonial India. The book analyses historical and contemporary academic and policy views on Adivasis, writings from indigenous scholar themselves, and looks at how indigenous groups have negotiated the Indian socio-political-economic space as subjects and objects of custom, forest, land, religion and art in the past two centuries. It discusses the various ways in which Adivasi cultural and political protest movements have redefined their spaces of existence, but also that much more reimagining is needed to situate Adivasi groups as diverse and distinct but as an integral part of the Indian mindscape.