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Globalisation and Sacred Adivasi Landscapes in Eastern India

Vinita Damodaran

Introduction¹

The rapid development of economic globalisation since about 1980 has made dramatic environmental and social impacts in the Indian sub-continent. These impacts can only be understood in terms of a historical perspective that includes the colonial and even earlier periods. In this chapter, I focus on the impact of globalisation in Orissa and Jharkhand, especially on the living environments of adivasi (indigenous/aboriginal or tribal) people, specifically in terms of effects on the dynamic relationship between culture, landscape and religion.

The history of the adivasi population of India involves displacement and often confinement in remoter forest regions over a long historical period. Their population of eighty million people are the poorest sector in India and retain elaborate systems of indigenous knowledge. Most espouse non-Hindu religions in which deities are closely linked to major landscape features, especially sacred woods and mountains and to cosmologies closely identified with objects and ideas in the natural world. Colonial rule hastened an existing process by which adivasis came under outsider domination and exploitative commercial relationships. Due to their geographical location the history of adivasis is intimately bound up with the transformation of India’s remaining forest and mountain regions and external pressures on both are closely linked. It was in this context that the forest landscapes of eastern India, especially in Jharkhand, became a symbolic terrain for definitions of tribal identity. Identities were transformed in the context of rapid ecological and cultural change by simultaneous ethnic claims to autonomy, superior environmental knowledge and the memorialisation of sites of conflict with external invaders. In Orissa in particular, where adivasis make up twenty-three per cent of the population, forest reserves, dam-building, metal factories and mining projects have subsequently caused wholesale displacement. Since 1947 more than five million people (ninety-five per cent of them adivasi) have been forcibly removed for development projects, almost all without any compensation. This scale of displacement is comparable to the numbers involved, for example, in post 1948 Palestine or in the Indian partition. They can also be compared with the displacements of the Scottish highland clearances and the treatment of native Americans and Australians by colonists. Eastern India is thus repeating the very pattern of environmental transformation and forced migration which defines some of the most shameful aspects of European, American and Australian history. More recently outside incursions into these areas has intensified in the face of neo-liberal pressures on the environment.

Adivasis currently find themselves confronting the world’s most powerful multi-national mining companies in nexus with global political and military interests that are initiating massive but under researched landscape changes. The history and dynamics of patterns of resistance and violence over the control and allocation of resources and the meaning of landscape form a critical part of a new kind of research directly linked to attempts to understand the predicament of ethnic identity and culture in the face of unrestrained globalising forces. In attempting to understand the nature of this resistance, one needs to examine the resilience and vitality of tribal cultures in the face of exploitation and repression and crushing inequalities in access to their own resources. This chapter explores the way in which different ethnic and national groups in eastern India perceived and used the landscape as a symbolic terrain for definitions of identity. It explores the region as an economic, ethnic, anthropologic, religious and ecological terrain and looks at the ways in which the landscape was reclaimed and reconstituted. It examines the relationship between the history and ‘sacralisation’ of the landscape by local communities and the explosion of emotions guiding contemporary ethnic autonomy movements in the region. Understanding of the vital connections between violence, ethnicity, indigeneity, the environment and the concepts of the ‘resource curse’ and ‘environmental justice’ remains undeveloped and two-dimensional despite its global importance. This chapter will more fully develop the themes explored in embryonic form by Martinez-Alier (2002), Watts (2003) and Peluso and Watts (2001). In particular, it builds on existing evidence (especially the work of Vitebsky 1993; Seeland and Schmithüsen 2003) as to the vital interconnections between adivasi religions and cosmology and the mountain and forested landscape and researches the ways in which rapid transformation is creating an existential and livelihood crisis.

Towards a History of Globalisation

The greatest physical impact of globalisation today on people and landscape in South Asia is being exerted in the mountainous parts of Orissa, Chattisgarh and Jharkhand which are among the poorest states of India. This is because they once possessed the bulk of largely untapped iron, bauxite and hydrological reserves in the sub-continent – all vital constituents of the spiralling Asian demand for minerals and metals. This wealth was first recognised in the 1920s by Cyril Fox, the British geologist who first planned a scheme integrating bauxite mining and dam-building to produce the electricity required in aluminium production; a colonial template which has proved highly resilient. Since 1991 large scale Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been permitted to mine in India. Most mining claims relate to bauxite reserves in the uplands of western Orissa so that over twenty mountain ranges in the region are now planned for exploitation by global mining companies. Many of these ranges have complex sacred meanings attached to them by adivasis as well as many of them being the locations of IUCN defined biodiversity ‘hotspots’.

Whilst creating jobs for coastal groups and opportunities for development of the shipping industry, mining has previously adversely affected western Orissa’s ecology and adivasi population. The wealth of the west has been almost literally drained to the east. Increasingly the environmental benefits of contemporary Orissa must be seen as opposed dualities: tribal versus caste Hindus; hill versus plain, mining versus shipping, submergence versus flood control. As the forces of globalisation accelerated after 1800, vigorous contestations for space and resources have taken place between adivasis, peasants, the state and mining and other commercial companies. Since 1945, and much more since 1990 these contests have, in the context of weak state governance, involved an increasing level of state and corporate violence (including extra-judicial killings) against adivasis and other peasants, coupled with a rising tide of violent and non-violent resistance and against a background of low-level armed ‘Naxalite’ insurgency throughout the central spine of India. The Kalinganagar massacre in Jajpur district on 1 January 2006 may mark a turning point in the breakdown of governance. Arguably, Indian central government is ceasing altogether to be able to effectively control or disentangle itself from the activities of multinational companies and their agents, intent on alienating indigenous land, irrespective of the legal protection conferred in 1950 by Schedule 5 of the Indian constitution.

Since the nineteenth century, the Indian Klondyke minerals rush is globally unparalleled. Yet Schedule 5 of the Indian constitution is consistently ignored, prohibiting the alienation of tribal lands. A 1996 Act strengthening the provisions of Schedule 5 has had little effect, with many mining corporations disregarding the legal protection of reserved forests under the Forest Acts. Two of the largest companies to commence operations in India are Vedanta Resources PLC and Laxmi Mittal PLC (both British based mining companies), who propose mining projects that will destroy sacred mountain sites at Nyamgirimali (the hill of law) and Gandhaardhan mountain respectively. The latter is the most sacred site in Orissa, closely associated with Lords Ram and Hanuman. As such, global mining interests now confront core values in mainstream Hindu as well as tribal religions. The confidence of the mining conglomerates in such plans indicates the extent to which local communities and environmental/human rights campaigners find themselves pitted against companies which, because of the strategic importance of aluminium, are integral to the needs of the global military industrial complex. As Nancy Peluso (in Heynen et al. 2007: 92) notes, the concern to establish property rights in resources associated with neoliberal approaches to environmental governance is derived from the need to legitimate practical enclosures through laws enforced by state agencies. The key questions to ask are ‘how’ and ‘why’ did state and civil society institutions allow such widespread neo-liberal enclosures representing so few peoples’ interests to proceed? This is a particularly critical provocation for India, given the importance of history, politics and social embeddedness involved.

One way to check the idealist tendencies of neo-liberal discourses and ideologies is through ‘a theoretical and methodological commitment to grounded engagement with actual places, people and ideologies’ (Heynen et al. 2007: 12; see also Peet and Watts 1996: 1–45) and the debates in environmental history and political ecology provide a powerful way of doing this. Political ecology marks ‘the liberatory or emancipatory potential of current political activity around environment and resources’ (Peet and Watts 1996: 2), while environmental history seeks to historically document the relationship of societies and species with the physical and biological world around them (Grove and Damodaran 2009: 24). This chapter uses these ideological frameworks to understand the impact and the response to long term and widespread land use changes in Eastern India in the context of globalisation.

Creating a Natural Heritage?

Much of this study investigates the contemporary forest struggles and forest resource crisis of Jharkhand against the historical background of colonial and post-colonial interventions in the region known as Chotanagpur in 1800–2000. The struggle to reclaim forest rights and lands in the colonial period was marked by uprisings such as that by Birsa Munda (in the 1890s). These continued in a sustained fashion in the post-colonial period, as the Bihar state regarded Chotanagpur as little more than an internal colony. The 1950s and 1960s saw the biggest land alienation of the period. Building on past research – which has included oral history, archival and other sources – this chapter explores the ways in which the forests of the uplands of Chotanagpur and northern Orissa emerge as a contested space between local communities, the forest department, landlords, mining companies and political parties.

It is important to note that in this context some current revisionism in environmental history and ecological anthropology has been focused on dismantling such long established terms as ‘tribe’, ‘forest’ and ‘indigenous’. The revisionist argument that earlier ethnographers and colonial administrators had mistakenly thought that ‘tribes’ were static entities lead many of these critics (for example, Guha 1999) to conclude that distinct tribes never existed and that claims for autonomy by indigenous peoples must have no theoretical legitimacy or historical validity. There is also a criticism of the colonial over-reading of the forested nature of the tribal landscape and the relationship of the tribes to the forest through the production of what has been called ‘primitive places’ (Sivaramakrishnan 1999: 36–39). There is no doubt that these ideas encoded colonial ideologies regarding the placement of different indigenous populations on the ‘natureculture’ continuum. But the argument that colonial administrators got it wrong every time is misguided. Colonial administrators did not just conjure up an imaginary landscape but analysed real landscape differences. In fact, it can be said that the material and the imaginary landscape constituted one another in complex ways. The narratives of travellers, surveyors and officials of the Raj in India often engaged with the land and the people. Genuine attempts were often made in the latter half of the nineteenth century to document local rights and land-use customs and to protect customary land practices of the tribes. In the context of the discourse of indigeneity, these colonial attempts are of extraordinary importance, though they are rarely given adequate attention.

That these colonial attempts also included the creation of large scale forest reserves which excluded indigenous populations must also be noted. Forest reserves which sterilised one-sixth of the land mass of India were put into place due to a variety of motives, some aesthetic, some environmental and climatic (Grove 1996). Very often they failed to take into account indigenous practices and needs (see Damodaran 1997). These colonial environmental legislations could be said to have constituted natural heritage areas preserved for scientific or aesthetic grounds or from the point of view of conservation which did not often take into account indigenous needs (Grove 1996; see also Neumann 1998). That forest reserves were created for a host of reasons, including environmental ones, has been persuasively argued by Richard Grove in Green Imperialism, which notes that ‘the edenic, romantic and physiocractic roots of environmentalism on Mauritius and in the Carribbean and India were strongly reinforced after 1820 by the writing of Alexander von Humbolt’ 1996: 11). However, the division of forests into protected and reserved forests resulted in limiting the hunting and forest rights of the tribes to forest produce.

What I am concerned with in this chapter is the valuing of the natural world in the context of rapid ecological and cultural change for indigenous communities effected through simultaneous claims to autonomy, superior environmental knowledge and the memorialisation of sites of conflict with external invaders. This theme links with the broader themes of this book as it examines the creation of what can be called ‘natural heritage’ areas by the Raj following the large scale environmental damage caused by colonialism. As the chapter reveals, these ideas of a natural heritage were also taken up by indigenous groups who used the notion to straddle concerns about both natural and cultural heritage. The discourse of the sacred grove and the reinvention of traditions exemplified tribal cultural assertion in the region.

Work on ethnicity in other contexts has moved beyond revisionist assumptions of the historical invalidity of categories of indigeneity and has effectively argued that ethnicity and ethnic ideologies are historically contingent creations. The recognition of the ‘invented’ nature of many traditions and the notion of the constructed nature of culture, race and ethnicity allows us to approach these questions meaningfully through a historical lens. What emerges here are links between culture and power and culture and resistance in which ‘culture’ is a medium through which power is both constituted and resisted. Instances of dramatic resistance to cultural hegemony and power of a particular class or group or western capitalism shows also that culture need not be always be on the side of power. Indigenous people’s movements strikingly demonstrate this. For example, while it may be true that the Chakmas of the Chittagong hill tracts were not the first to enter these regions (they were but one of a succession of immigrant cultures following the Arakanese and Tripurans into the area), today Chakma identity is firmly linked to the hill tracts where they have sought to develop an ‘indigenous’ model of state, society and culture (van Schendel 1992). Elsewhere in India, as Hardiman argues, the term adivasi relates to a particular historical development: that of subjugation during the nineteenth century of a wide variety of communities, which before colonial rule had remained free or relatively free from the control of outsiders. The experience generated a spirit of resistance which incorporated a ‘consciousness’ of the adivasi against the ‘outsider’. As Hardiman 1987: 15) notes, the term was used by political activists in Chotanagpur in the 1930s, with the aim of forging a new sense of identity among different ‘tribal’ peoples; a tactic that has had considerable success.

The idea of the ‘invented’ nature of culture however needs to be qualified somewhat. In the context of Indonesia, Tania Li (1996) has argued that a group’s self identification as ‘tribal’ or ‘indigenous’ is not natural or inevitable but neither is it simply invented, adopted or imposed. It is, rather, a positioning that draws on ‘historically sedimented practices, landscapes and repertoires of meaning and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle’ (ibid.: 339). Here Li draws on Hall 1990: 225) who has argued that ‘cultural identities come from somewhere and have histories. But […] far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to continuous “play” of history, culture and power’. For Hall, identities are always about becoming, as well as being, but are never simply invented. Such a view, as Li argues, ‘offers a way out of the impasse in which those who historicise the identities are accused of undermining subaltern political projects founded on ordinary perhaps essential truths’ (Li 1996: 343). It is in this sense that I explore the engagement of local communities with their forests in Chotanagpur over a long period of time; their histories of struggle with the colonial and post-colonial state; and the growing articulation of an indigenous identity. As we shall see, the politics around indigeneity had important consequences for rights, natural resources and ultimately statehood.

Landscape, Identity and Resistance

The forested landscape of Chotanagpur provided the material background to colonial and nationalist debates on notions of indigeneity. In colonial discourse, a ‘tribal’ way of life was intimately linked with the forested environment, though this was changing throughout the nineteenth century as the lands and the forests of the local communities came under sustained attack both by an aggrandising colonial state and by private landowners. The impact of the destruction of the local forest environment was exacerbated in the context of increasing landlordism in rural Chotanagpur. It is of course important not to see Chotanagpur as a monolithic whole but to look at interegional variations in colonial policy, indigenous responses and its effect on resource use and the environment.

The northern districts had begun to be heavily overrun by Hindu immigrants long before the advent of the British. The pace of change increased under colonial rule and even the southern districts began to feel threatened by the mid- and late-nineteenth century. The Mundas in Ranchi, for example, had managed to hold on to their traditional (khuntkhatti) tenures only in part in the face of outsider landlord encroachment. By the time of the Census operations in 1881, the original indigenous population in the districts of Palamau and Hazaribagh was only 36 per cent and 34 per cent, while in the remoter districts of Ranchi and Singhbhum it was at 74 per cent and 75 per cent. In the northern districts of Palamau and Hazaribagh and in the Santhal Parganas, increasing subinfeudation and the growing spread of debt bondage were the main grievances of the peasantry. In the Santhal Parganas, in certain districts, as in Barbhum, the invasion of the pargana by a powerful English company bent on destroying the rights of the Ghatwals or Bhumij khuntkhattidars gave rise to much disturbance. These rights, all across Chotanagpur, were to be challenged by colonial courts and superior land interests. One settlement report recorded ‘but it is common experience in Chotanagpur that the aboriginals are ruined by their incapacity to state their claims intelligently’. Clearly the discursive framework in which they had to operate disadvantaged local communities. This situation was only to intensify in the period of the twentieth century (see Damodaran 2006b).

In many places the landlord and the state battled with each other to secure large areas of jungle land, extinguishing the traditional common rights of the people (Sifton 1917). In Ranchi district, several of the landlords looked upon the jungles as a providential asset to be exploited for payment of debt (Reid 1912). They were prevented from fully exploiting this asset only by difficulties of communication, so that the more remote jungles survived. However, most of the latter were taken over by the state for forest reserves under the rigorous policy of forest conservation introduced by the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s the total area of reserved forest in Chotanagpur was 5839 square miles. Of these over 5431 square miles were closed for grazing purposes. In 1894 all state lands within the five districts of Chotanagpur division were declared to be protected forest further controlling hitherto unclassed forests. Where patches of jungle survived the grip of both state and the landlords, the spread of the railway system further aided the process of destruction.

It was in this context, and with a growing sense of injustice, that the landscape of Chotanagpur became a symbolic terrain for definitions of Chotanagpuri identity. These identities were transformed in the context of this rapid ecological and cultural change (Daniels 1993: 5). It must be noted here that the term ‘landscape’ is itself a complex concept. As Cosgrove argues, the term can be seen as a ‘socio-historical construct’, a way of seeing projected onto the land which has its own techniques and which articulates a particular way of experiencing a relationship with nature. It can be argued in a similar fashion that the landscape of Chotanagpur has been reclaimed and reconstituted in defining Chotanagpuri identity (for more recent writings on history, landscape and identity see Lowenthal 1991). Patrick Kirch and Michael Sahlins 1992: 25) have noted in the context of Hawaii that ‘the landscape and its legends inscribe a criticism of the existing regime. In the current jargon, the landscape is text. Places and names evoke an alternate society older, truer and more directly related to the people’. In this way were the landscapes of Chotanagpur organised by stories and legends of conquest and through memories of better times.

The landscapes of Chotanagpur were lived as a human landscape in the past through multiple engagements of local communities with their environment. The original forests were spread out over thousands of square miles, especially in the districts of Hazaribagh, Singhbhum, Palamau and Ranchi, all of which had large forest areas. Local rulers had tended to preserve the forest for military reasons and (as Walter Hamilton noted in 1820) in several parts of Chotanagpur the woods had been forested with great care by the rajas as a protection against invasion from outside. The trees were mainly either moist deciduous or dry deciduous and the whole division had a rich growth of sal (shorea robusta).

Settlement reports note that most of the communities, even the settled agricultural ones and particularly the women of these communities, had a highly sophisticated technical knowledge of their jungles. The Hos of Singhbhum, for example, had names for all the common plants and those of economic importance to them and, like the forest Mundas, were well versed in the edible properties of plants. The Birhors, in the extreme east of Singhbhum, were a wandering community who lived by snaring monkeys and by collecting the fibre of the Bauhinia vahlii creeper (Roy 1925). The forest environment, and a knowledge of it, was thus of critical importance to the local people, particularly in dietary terms. Its importance in terms of food was paralleled by an equal significance in terms of belief and the two were not truly separable. Rather, Chotanagpur folk taxonomy was completely embedded in and mediated by the local cultural order.

Munda understandings of the landscape and its productivity seem to encompass conceptual links between women and forests. For example, every Munda village had its own particular spirits whose duty it was to look after the crops. These spirits were known as bongas, which was the generic name referring to spirits and the power and force of mountains, hills, forests, trees, rivers, houses and village. One such spirit, known as Desawali, played a large part in Munda festivals which were connected with the cultivation of the land. The home of this presiding deity was the sarna or sacred grove, a little path of jungle that was left as a refuge for the gods where they might live apart when all else was cleared for cultivation. During all seasons of the year offerings were made in the sarna, for the success and failure of the crops depended on the favour of the Desawali. Among the Hos, the religious and symbolic community incorporated the forest in various ways. The twofold division of the landscape into tame (hatu) and wild (buru) represented the ongoing attempt of the communities to pacify and live with the forest (buru) and its spirits Burubongako (Yorke 1976: 73). As Yorke notes, religious boundaries ensured important notions of community. All the springs, hills and large forest trees left standing in the village after clearing still harboured spirits against which the protection of the village spirit was necessary. All animals and plants were divided into those that were domesticated and hence of the village and those that were wild and belonged to the forest (ibid.).

The Chotanagpuris tended to experience the forest and village as ontologically part of each other; one being the life force for the other’s continuing existence. An interesting study among the Nayakas of south India by Nurit Bird-David (1992) argues for a similar cosmic economy of sharing. The Nayakas converse, dance, sing and even share cigarettes with the spirits of the forest which they invoke with shamanistic experience. For the Konds, gods, goddesses and ancestors were associated with different places in the ritual landscape and exemplified the sacred geography of their universe. Hills were thought to be domains of malevolent deities and the taboo on harvesting forest products in Kond burial grounds was due to the belief that the area was inhabited by ancestral spirits. Rituals to propitiate the earth goddess extended from the extreme (as in neighbouring Orissa among the Maria Konds who practised human sacrifice as an example of ‘fixing sacredness in the earth’) to witch hunting in Singhbhum in times of drought and famine. These practices seem to have increased as a result of the destabilisation caused by British intervention and the increasing incidence of drought and famine which began to plague the tribes from the late-nineteenth century (Padel 1995: 135).

What can be argued here is that Chotanagpuri understandings of the landscape, their stories of nature and their lived history, were to differ radically from the perceptions of nature and the land of colonial scientists and policy makers and later of a modernising nationalist elite. This is, however, not to romanticise indigenous peoples and their relationship to nature. In his reply to Obeysekere, Sahlins 1995: 14) has noted that the post-modern attack on the notion of a bounded and coherent culture has occurred at the very moment when groups such as the Maoris, Tibetans, Australian aborigines around the world ‘all speak of their culture using that word or some other equivalent, as a value worthy of respect, commitment and defence’. He argues that no good history can be written without regard for ‘ideas, actions and ontologies that are not and never were our own’ (ibid.). To the Chotanagpuris therefore the landscape was an important context for their ritual and customary traditions. The destruction of forests that was to occur as a result of colonial intervention in the nineteenth century, and later was to change this relationship between the people and their environment. However, the memory of the landscape was to live on and it became a repository of Chotanagpur’s nostalgic past to be revived in complex oppositional contexts.²

It can be argued that the despoliation of the forested landscape and the transformation of the peoples’ relationship with their environment in Chotanagpur in the nineteenth century was a powerful memory that was revived in periods of cultural resistance. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this resulted in specific cultural images of the landscape being evoked through the ritual festivals of the sacred grove and emerging as a factor in protest. Images of the landscape have long played a role in cultural resistance in other regions. For example, as Daniels 1993: 37) notes, the ‘ethnic nationalism fuelling the dissolution of the Soviet Union was codified by pictorial images of independent homelands’. Resistance may have been fanned by memories of better times in a less despoiled setting. These memories were present in the ‘landscape of their current servitude’. In the context of Chotanagpur, the ‘remembered landscape’ (Kirch and Sahlins 1992) was to fuel a long cycle of protest.

All through the nineteenth century the local communities of Chotanagpur protested against growing cultural and physical incursions into their lives. Beginning with the unrest in Tamar in 1816 and the Munda rebellion in 1832, disaffection continued through the mutiny of 1857 and the last decades of the nineteenth century saw unrest in almost every district of Chotanagpur (Kumar 1991: 87; Damodaran 2006a: 125; see also Dasgupta 1999). The Birsa Munda uprising in the 1890s and the Tana Bhagat movement of the early twentieth century was the culmination of this period of rebellion. By the twentieth century there was thus an established tradition of protest in the region and it is to this we now turn. The modern political idiom of protest through the Jharkhand parties in the 1920s and 1930s had the effect of keeping traditions of protest alive though this time it was couched in democratic terms and led by the tribal leader, Jaipal Singh (see Damodaran 1997). Constitutional negotiations of the 1930s and 1940s ensured that tribal rights were high on the nationalist agenda and building on the protective legislation of the British in terms of land alienation issues, the tribes were given special recognition and protection under the 5th schedule of the constitution of India.

Post-Colonial Discontents

In the immediate post-colonial period, the government of Bihar pushed ahead with a massive exploitation of the forest and mineral wealth of the region while maintaining in its official ‘tribal’ policies that the ‘tribals’ should be allowed to develop according to their own genius. After the 1950s, thousands of acres of adivasi land were lost to new industries. In this period, struggles to halt these changes developed under a new leadership and resulted in the creation of political organisations like the Birsa Seva Dal and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). The new political extremism was reflected most clearly in the formation, in 1973, of the JMM, whose object was to form a separate Jharkhand state, end the exploitation of ‘tribals’ by ‘non-tribals’ and secure preferential treatment for ‘sons of the soil’ in the matter of employment. Under the aegis of this organisation, adivasi consciousness acquired a new political orientation. They led large scale movements of protest to regain tribal lands in the 1960s and 1970s. The period 1967–74 saw many struggles under the aegis of the JMM to recover alienated lands from moneylenders and rich peasants in Chotanagpur, amounting to a renewed assertion of strength of a people long exploited (Maharaj and Iyer 1982).

A history of this period of obvious exploitation can help us understand the nature of the counter discourse of the local people in Chotanagpur. Faced with economic and political marginalisation, the adivasi leadership in Bihar under the Jharkhand party first sought to assert its political views by emphasising a broad convergence of interests with other non-adivasi groups. In a region where the adivasi/non-adivasi distinction had been blurred through decades of migration and where the poorer parts of the Hindu migrant population were as badly off as their adivasi brethren, it would have been politically inept to emphasise only an adivasi identity. However, the constitutional policy followed by the Jharkhand party through its embracing the language of modernity and the lack of a radical programme in the countryside soon resulted in its decline and its ultimate merger with the Congress in 1963.³ That this happened with disastrous consequences for the adivasi people’s struggle in the 1960s is evident from the attempts made in the later 1960s and 1970s to evolve new independent political organisations to meet popular demands and, specifically the emergence of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha as a radical organisation developing out of the agrarian struggles of the 1960s. This organisation attempted a successful cultural revival in the 1970s and 1980s and revived the image of the Jharkhand people as the inheritors of their ancestral lands and forests. A new and interesting period in the struggle by what was increasingly seen as the ‘indigenous people’ of Jharkhand against an oppressive state had begun (Munda and Mullick 2003). It was in this context and given a growing sense of adivasi consciousness that the landscape of Chotanagpur became a symbolic terrain for definitions of Chotanagpuri identity (see Damodaran 1997).

The Discourse of the Sacred Forest

The JMM gave particular emphasis to a cultural revival of adivasi rituals related to the land and signalled the revival of the sahrul puja. This ‘festival of the sacred grove’ which was traditionally confined to the villages, now became a grand political event in urban centres and was accompanied by large processions, drum beating and dancing, with large crowds lining the streets. In the context of a despoiled landscape, the ritual harked back to the days of an idyllic environmental past. It can be seen as a selective use of memory, where the memory of a pristine environmental past is linked to the solution of contemporary political and economic problems. Given the ecological degradation in Chotanagpur today and the poor state of its village sacred groves, often left with only one remaining tree, this ritual took on enormous symbolic significance in the 1980s and 1990s. It evoked a particular image of the landscape ‘older, truer and more directly related to the people’ (Kirch and Sahlins 1992: 25) and was used to revive memories of better times and to criticise the inequities of the current regime. It symbolised a flamboyant assertion of ‘tribal’ identity and strength and can be compared to the Ramanavami or Moharrum processions in demonstrating militancy.⁴ The puja thus became a highly visible, elaborate and ritualised culture of public celebration involving both the performers and the crowds in a collective act articulating the special relationship of the Chotanagpuri peoples with nature and asserting their rights as true custodians of their lands and forests. It is possible to argue, in this context, as Paul Gilroy 1991: 214) does when he describes the performance of black expressive cultures, that these performances were an attempt to transform the relationship ‘between the performers and the crowd in dialogic rituals so that spectators acquired the active role of participants in collective processes which are sometimes cathartic and which may symbolise or even create a community’.

This reinvention of ‘tribal’ traditions happened in a complex oppositional context where indigenous populations were threatened by forces of progress and modernity. Migration had changed the character of Chotanagpur society and by the late-nineteenth century it was a society that could not really be categorised as predominantly adivasi. Yet an adivasi culture was asserted through a revival of ethnic symbols and myths. Elements of adivasi self-government were also revived or re-invented. The Biasi (assembly) in the Santhal Parganas began to function as a court without fees or pleaders to deal out simple justice. Traditions of collective farming and preservation of jungles, pastures and common land began to be asserted more forcefully, while common grain pools were encouraged. The attitude of the JMM towards non-adivasis, however, was still ambivalent. While the concept of diku was central to the notions of adivasi identity and solidarity, the Jharkhand parties began to realise that they could not sustain an appeal based on ethnicity alone (Damodaran 2006a; 2006b). Many of the low-caste migrants who arrived in the region in the nineteenth century felt that they had as much a right to be in Chotanagpur as the adivasis. Any political programme for Jharkhand therefore had to include these groups and the Jharkhand parties were therefore only partly constituted by ethnic meanings and groupings.

Thus, while an adivasi identity was emphasised, these boundary mechanisms were breached with ease. Instead, a more regional identity was taking over based on secondary cultural markers; that is, on a shared history of exploitation, a territorial boundary and a shared culture of the adivasi groups. The latter is important because although there was a growing understanding that the future of non-tribals was assured in the envisaged state of Jharkhand, the parties continued to lay importance on ‘tribal’ culture. The appeal to voters was made on grounds of a common economic and cultural predicament. Ethnicity continued to have force in Jharkhand to the extent that it was a politically powerful argument against the way in which state and national political arenas were structured in favour of the dominant outsider groups (see Sollors 1989). Thus, although the parties emphasised a regional identity, ethnic arguments continued to be aired at the popular level. The flag of the Jharkhand party was green in colour, deliberately to emphasise the common cultural and ecological heritage of all Jharkhandi adivasis, while the election symbol was a sismandi (a particular kind of fowl sacrificed to a bonga). The JMM flag had the traditional weapons of the bow and arrow as symbols of tribal resurgence (Hembram 1982: 89). Diku culture, it was argued, showed little respect for any of these symbols. But there is little doubt that a homogenous ‘adivasi identity’ can no longer be asserted given the history of the region and the impact of the long history of low caste Hindu migration though ethnicity continued to rear its head in different guises.⁵

The Jharkhand parties, in this period, also attempted to attack the relatively careless attitude of the Bihar state government with regard to environmental issues in Chotanagpur. One of the most widespread movements in the area in recent times was motivated against attempts by the Forest Development Corporation to replace sal by sagwan (teak), since the latter is more valuable as wood in the market. This had grave consequences for the lifestyle of the local people. Sal products have been useful to them in various ways. In 1978, resistance to the planting of teak was sparked off when the forest department undertook to plant teak in 2000 hectares of the sal forest. A strong popular belief developed that nothing grew under teak, and particularly not the grass roots and tubers on which the local wildlife and people subsisted. It was also alleged, that since elephants did not eat teak leaves, they would be forced to seek food in areas where crops grew, thus increasing their depredations. The agitators also argued that fruit-bearing trees were being cut down to establish teak nurseries, thus depriving the tribals of a source of food (Bhabha 1994: 20).

In recent years many ethnic movements have legitimised their claims by reference to a global environmentalism (Parajuli 1998). This involves arguing that the local people are the best stewards of the landscape and have the best claims to control it. The discourse of the rights of indigenous peoples to their forest was thus an important part of the struggle of Jharkhand parties. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Birsa Seva Dal, Bihar Prant Hul Jharkhand party and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha were each set up to contest what they saw as the tyranny of developmentalism both within and outside the parliamentary area. These organisations participated in elections, while their activists were also involved in the forcible cropping of diku lands, in sabotaging local transport lines and in organising new forest satyagrahas (Singh 1982: 14–21). There is also a renewed attempt to preserve the sacred groves of the adivasis and a growing protest against dam building as at Koel Karo. The effort to prevent the flooding of tribal lands and groves under this project has generated widespread support. The main outcry seems to be directed against the destruction of the sacred groves where the gods are said to reside. Over the years they were successful in stalling the project, indicating the power of collective resistance.⁶

By the mid 1980s a fully-fledged movement was under way to claim the lands and the forests expropriated by outsiders and the state as their own. The attack on forest lands held in the reserved forest areas that was inaugurated in Singhbhum soon spread to other areas in neighbouring Ranchi where under the auspices of the Jharkhand parties large areas in the protected forest zones came to be legitimate targets for struggle (Areeparampil 1992). As the forest department fought back, attacks on forest guards and the burning of forest department rest houses in the Saranda forest area became a regular feature of the protest. The slogans of jal, jangal and jameen (water, forest and land) and the movement for securing ‘indigenous’ rights had come to acquire new significance. In Singhbhum alone, 4000 acres of forest were illegally cut.

The phase of environmental vandalism that occurred in Jharkhand in the 1980s and 1990s leads one to a reassessment of ‘indigenous’ forest rights. It also leads one to question whether local people should have the right to freely pursue traditional practices or to develop their lands, especially when the exercise of these rights has implications in conflict with environmental values. This is an issue that is currently being debated globally (Perrett 1998). The debate has been particularly controversial where threats to the survival of endangered species have been involved. It has been noted in the context of the American Indians that the traditional subsistence conservationist practices of indigenous peoples have not really led to a sound modern environmentalism (ibid.). Furthermore the granting of land rights to indigenous people in the American Indian context has repeatedly led to their not returning to traditional subsistence practices, but instead to their seeking to develop their lands economically without any respect for the environment.

In the case of Chotanagpur, whilst one cannot deny that traditional indigenous practices incorporated valuable environmentalist lessons as we have seen, the terrible toll on the land associated with state intervention and capitalist interests in the colonial and post-colonial period has resulted in these communities demanding the return of their forests, not necessarily to develop them sustainably as in the past but in order to harvest them, often uneconomically, in order that they may not lose out to commercial interests. Very often they have been abetted in the process by commercial interests. Meanwhile contractors, timber merchants and corrupt politicians have used the cloak of the popular movement of the jungle katao andolan to loot forests.

Roy Perrett (1998) has argued that the conflicts between indigenous rights and environmental interests can be seen as conflicts between local and global justice. He argues that it is unlikely that (given the history of injustice) local people are going to give way when the exercise of their land rights happens to conflict with environmentalist values. In the case of Chotanagpur, the value of these debates lies in the framing of policy where local communities have a stake in protecting their environmental resources. Examples of what may happen when trees rather than local people become the objects of conservation have been provided in many accounts (see, for example, Sato 2000; Cohen 2000). New policy departures need to be evolved that will prove effective in extending the life span of the world’s remaining forests and in countering the formidable interests in exploiting them for short term gain. Co-management of resources and joint forest management have been seen as the way forward. Only individual case studies will show the extent of participation or show the ways in which definitions of ‘community’ have in fact strengthened certain hierarchies in society (Sundar 2000).

Mining and Sacred Landscapes

since 1945 the impact of deforestation, mining and dam-building development, has been greatest on adivasis people through forced migration, slum development and clashes with immigrants from other parts of India. This has been particularly so in the post 1991 period. The minerals industry has developed and continues to develop new models of interaction with indigenous communities claiming that it goes beyond national regulations in doing so. The UN Global Compact and the World Bank/IFC also claim to have devised new ‘policy and peformance standards’ to the same end. The bank’s benchmark is critical because, ostensibly, its guidelines are followed by more than thirty global investment banks and the OECD. It is essential to examine closely both the criteria and the means used by multinational companies and investors (private and multilateral) in supposedly implementing and monitoring these new standards. India is an important testing ground in this respect, since several major mining and metals companies are now vying with each other to present themselves as best possible models of cultural and economic sustainability. However, immediate evidence suggests that these practices have been blatantly flouted in Orissa and Jharkhand as elsewhere.

As Hugh Brody 2010: xiv) notes, ‘loss of land and forced resettlement, especially for the tribal people who sustain themselves in what remains of the forests and great river systems of India, is indeed a sacrifice of both livelihoods and lives’. Taking his cue from the work of Felix Padel, he argues ‘that the sacrifice to development is a human sacrifice … it is in this way, for those who are made to give up their lands and homes to large dams and great mining ventures that the officials who urge such developments are indeed asking for and then insisting on human sacrifice’ (ibid.). In turn, Padel 2010: 320) notes that the pace of change in Eastern India today and the scale of displacement is far greater than anything in the colonial past: ‘Industrialisation has already displaced an estimated sixty million of India’s villagers within the last sixty years, three million in Orissa alone around 75 per cent of them who are adivasis and dalits.’

Despite the lip service paid to Schedule 5 of the constitution that ostensibly protects tribal rights, ‘land is acquired using the notorious land acquisition act of 1894 with its concept of government’s eminent domain’ (ibid.). Foreign companies mainly registered on the London Stock Exchange and banks are gaining control over India’s prime natural resources. Padel is particularly apt in drawing the parallels between patterns of development put into place in the first phase of globalisation under the East India Company and current forms of development. He argues convincingly that in the case ‘of mining companies this means permanent extraction of deposits and large scale pollution by metal factories with an eye on the profits to be made through increasing the consumption of metals in various sectors and through metals trading. As the speed of extraction increases, it is apparent that mining companies make use of a manipulation of law and finance structurally similar to the techniques used in the EIC takeover of power in the eighteenth and nineteenth century’ (ibid.: 322).

The proposed mining of the sacred mountain of the Konds, Niyamgiri, has been the focus of much public attention recently. The forest on this mountain is well preserved as primary sal forest as it is seen as the abode of the Niyam Raja, the lord of law who guarantees the fertility of the land of the Konds. There is a strict taboo on cutting the forests of the summit. The mining of the mountain is tantamount to an environmental and social disaster. Its impact on the culture and religious cosmology of adivasis (especially the Kuttia and Dongria Kondh) people who see the bauxite mountains as devata, manifestations of Gods and for whom different parts of the landscape are integral to their religion, cosmology and identity is an enormously destructive one. Losing their sacred mountains brings death to tribal culture. It also severs ritual contact with their ancestors, their egalitarian social system exchanging it for the values of a more corporate society. In environmental terms the mining is also destructive, creating a wasteland. The pollution of the Bansadhara river quickly followed and the leaching of red mud and toxic gases have killed people and animals (ibid.: 335).

Conclusion

The cultural struggle for indigenous rights being waged in many parts of contemporary India must be seen, I think, as essentially a movement directed towards transforming the balance of power in the region. In Gramscian terms it may be seen as a struggle for hegemony in the cultural and political arena. In rejecting terms such as jangali that form part of a discourse that aids compliance towards forms of economic and political domination, by forcefully claiming indigenous status and rejecting the notions of backwardness and inferiority in comparison with the plains Hindus, adivasi leaders in the twentieth century attempted to secure political advantage in the colonial and post-colonial period. In the process, claims about the inherent originality or purity of adivasi culture are made, while the history of acculturation with the dominant Hindu culture are pushed aside. It is in this moment of struggle against dominant values and the narratives of the state, as Homi Bhabha 1994: 37) notes, that the ‘meanings and symbols of culture are appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew’.

It seems very likely that ethnicity will increasingly dominate Indian politics. As the discourse of the nation state in India becomes increasingly undemocratic, ethnic politics seeks to express itself more forcefully. Moreover, while regarding ethnicity as a process, there is little doubt that with the creation of the new states of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and so on, ethnic arguments in India have already come into their own but it continues to tread a complicated path.⁷ The extraordinary attempts of the Jharkhand government to award indigenous land claims on the basis of colonial documentation dating back to the 1920s must be seen in this context. More surprising is the limited success achieved by the BJP to co-opt the adivasis. This has included a determined effort on the part of the Hindutva brigade to Hinduise tribals, in the process dropping the word adivasi from the lexicon and substituting it for vanvasi or forest dweller. This can be seen as a move to deny ‘indigenous’ status to the tribals because it runs contrary to the Hindutva notion that the aryans are the original indigenous people. The attempt to ban cow slaughter and conversion to Christianity is part of the determined effort to ‘return tribals to the Hindu fold’. The right wing agenda to co-opt these groups indicates the ways in which the term ‘indigenous’ continues to be a highly contested one.

In this context one might state that given the history of the Jharkhand movement, claims to an ‘authentic indigeneity’ cannot be so easily dismissed by revisionist writers (for example, Guha 1999). Dirks et al. have usefully argued the political significance of these categories for subordinate and marginalised groups seeking to contest the power of hegemonic formations whether constituted within academic disciplines, institutional fields or at the level of whole societies. They note, ‘if otherness is a category that must always be suspected, nevertheless it may facilitate our attempts to listen to the voices of anthropologist informants and colonized subalterns’ 1994: 38). The fact that the term adivasi with its connotation of autochthonous power has found most favour with these communities is of great significance. It can be seen as a way of creating alternative power structures and of being outside the narratives of the Indian nation state. As Skaria 1999: 281) puts it, ‘being adivasi or indigenous is about the shared experience of the loss of the forests, the alienation of land, repeated displacements since independence in the name of development and much more’.

A reassessment of the post-1865 period will need to take into account the local traditions and transforming historical developments that have led gradually to the emergence of the identity of the adivasi. In the absence of such an analysis, the argument that invocations of indigeneity can only have explosive consequences simply ignores wholesale the real and extant politics of such identity formations in India (see Guha 1999: 202–3). The embracing of the identity of indigenous or adivasi must be seen in political terms. While it may be true that fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity may have dangerous political consequences, it is inevitable in the Jharkhand context given the effects of economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, social manipulation and ideological domination on the cultural formation of minority subjects and discourses. It is useful to see contemporary adivasi culture and the assertion of indigenous rights in many parts of India today as a form of continuing political struggle, albeit one deeply connected with a critical global environmental predicament.

This chapter demonstrates the environmental, economic and human consequences of economic globalisation for one of the poorest but resource-rich parts of the rural ‘South’ in eastern India. It questions the assumption that such globalisation is beneficial in the short and long term to local people and examined the landscape, cultural and human rights impacts of the kinds of development strategies imposed by governments that accept or collaborate with models of development currently pursued and advocated by multi-national corporations and world economic organisations. We should further question whether globalisation might actually be creating a new post-colonial imperialism even less accountable than its predecessor and one characterised by extreme ecological inequity, growing environmental injustice, human rights abuses and a consequent rising tide of state violence and counter-violence. This study thus recommends the exploration of possibilities for alternative patterns of development more beneficial in terms of environmental justice and local prosperity.

Notes

1  Portions of this article have appeared in prior form as Damodaran, V. (2006) ‘Indigenous forests: rights, discourses, and resistance in Chotanagpur, 1860–2002’, in G. Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds) Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, and Damodaran, V. (2006) ‘The politics of marginality and the construction of indigeneity in Chotanagpur’, Postcolonial Studies, 9.2: 179–196.

2  Simon Schama 1995: 61) has noted that ‘[l]andscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood, water and rock […] once a certain idea of the landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact part of the scenery’.

3  The merger was declared illegal shortly afterwards and the Jharkhand party was revived.

4  Some scholars studying ‘festive culture’ have interpreted rituals as manifestations of an evolving folk culture creating meaning and helping people to cope with an alien world, as instruments for the promotion of group solidarity and as public assertions of group power and demands (see Conzen 1989). The celebration of the Hindu religious festival of Ramnavami and the Muslim festival of Muharram were often used to assert the strength of these communities in urban areas and sometimes resulted in inter-communal rioting. A reassertion of traditional cultural practices is an intrinsic element of the economy and political struggles of third world peoples (see Dirlik 1987).

5  Homi Bhabha 1994: 28) has emphasised the ‘hybrid moment of political change’ where ideas and forms are rearticulated; where there is a negotiation between gender and class where each formation encounters the displaced. He argues that the agents of political change are discontinuous, divided subjects caught in conflicting interests and identities.

6  The efforts of the BJP-led NDA government to recommence work on the project was met with stubborn resistance resulting in the death of ten adivasis in police firings. A PUCL bulletin notes that this recommencement of the project is ‘indicative of the fact that in these heydays of globalisation and liberalisation, the government and power elites of the tribal states of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh are preparing for mortgaging the forests and rights of tribals for the sake of national and multi-national capital’ (see PUCL 2001).

7  This is not to argue that the politics of the new state will be radically different from the preceding state of Bihar. Corruption continues to plague the new state and the NDA alliance of the BJP and the Samata party is bogged down with controversies. The threat posed by the ultra left MCC (Maoist Coordination Committee) in attacking small zamindaris has proved a major irritant to the new state in the period leading up to December 2001. The fact remains that the NDA alliance was seen to soft pedal on the ‘indigenous’ issue. The Marandi government has taken up the cudgels in favour of ‘indigenes’ by its ‘domicile policy’ for clerical government jobs causing outrage among the settled Biharis. The police firing in Ranchi where five people were killed is witness to this. The fact remains that the indigenous population in the current state of Jharkhand number less than thirty per cent. Any policy for ousting ‘outsiders’ or redistributing resources can only be painful and bloody. It remains to be seen how the state will fare in relation to it impoverished communities.

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