Subalternity and Resistance in the Bhil Heartland: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Scenarios

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> SEMINAR SERIES <strong>ALF GUNVALD NILSEN</strong> Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Bergen On <strong>Subalternity and Resistance in the Bhil Heartland: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Scenarios</strong> <strong>Abstract : </strong>Current debates and research on Adivasi struggles in India tends to focus on the Maoist movement in central and eastern India and resistance against large-scale processes of dispossession. Important as this phenomenon may be, there are also other traditions of Adivasi struggle in other regions of the country which, if given their due attention, can enrich and diversify debates over subaltern politics in contemporary India. This paper aims to make a contribution in this direction by investigating the character and trajectory of democratic mobilisation among Bhil Adivasis in western Madhya Pradesh. The first part of the paper outlines the contours of Adivasi subalternity in western Madhya Pradesh - focusing in particular on the workings of local state-society relations. I then move on to trace the historical lineage of the political subalternity of the Bhils by delineating the restructuring of sovereignty that occurred across the tribal heartland of western India under as a result of colonial state-making projects from the 1820s to the 1940s. In the third and final part of the paper, I analyse the ways in and extent to which social movements rooted in the Bhil communities of western Madhya Pradesh in the 1980s and 1990s succeeded in democratising local-state society relationships in the region. I conclude by reflecting on what the conceptual challenges that the trajectory of these struggles throw up for the study of subalternity, resistance, and state-society relations. <strong>Friday, 29 January 2016</strong> <strong>About the Speaker: </strong>Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, Norway. His research focuses on social movements and subaltern politics in the global South, with a particular concentration on India. He is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010) and We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neo-liberalism (Pluto Press, 2014) and the editor of Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development, and Resistance (Palgrave, 2011), Marxism and Social Movements (Brill, 2013) and New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (OUP, 2015).