On 15th November 2000, a sizable southern portion of the Indian state of Bihar came into being as the state of Jharkhand. This was a great success and cause for celebration among India's Adivasi activists and indigenous rights activists around the world. The long struggle for separation of the region from Bihar and the creation of Jharkhand was fought in the name of the Adivasi, loosely translated as “first residents” or indigenous people of the land. The rhetorical idea of Jharkhand's adivasi history and identity articulated by activists for the broader national audience and for international indigenous organizations had finally materialized as the first new “indigenous” state within India.
In this book, Shah asks “what it means to live in an indigenous state” (p. 32) from the perspective of poor and marginalized indigenous people of Jharkhand. This is an important empirical question not only for indigenous rights activists or development practitioners but also for those engaged in broader contemporary debates on concepts of indigeneity, social justice for indigenous peoples, and indigenous governance. How does the creation of an indigenous state alter the relationship between indigeneity and the indigent?
Shah explores these questions by reflecting on the international politics of indigeneity and how these have been utilized by indigenous rights activists that fought for the creation of Jharkhand. Shah highlights the different arguments that scholars and activists have made for either assimilation or protection of tribal people and how Jharkhand activists challenged calls for assimilation and instead emphasized protection of tribal culture and its autonomy from the Hindu mainstream. She traces how the campaign for Jharkhand's autonomy evolved from arguments based on population majority to a rhetoric that highlighted exploitation of tribal people by “outsiders,” and how the myth of the tribe was being produced at a time when class differentiation within the region's adivasi community was most pronounced between its urban-based middle-class activists, a small upwardly mobile rural elite, and a large marginalized “tribal peasantry.”
Shah's central argument is that the rhetoric of protection of indigenous people and culture is articulated through a discourse that marginalizes the poorest, and that the claims to the state made by Jharkhand's indigenous activists and rural elites do not necessarily match up with the interests of the people they claim to represent. The creation of an indigenous state does not necessarily help its indigent indigenous population. They live “in the shadows of the state,” seeking as far as possible to keep away from its exploitative reach. Shah describes their lived experience by focusing on the key features that activists have often attributed to indigenous communities to assert their ethno-regionalist vision for Jharkhand: the desire for maintaining indigenous forms of governance; the need for development; closeness to nature; attachment to land.
Shah concludes that the discourses of indigenous rights activists, the rural elites, the Maoists, and the developmental state overlap to produce an ethno-regionalist vision which conceptualizes indigent Mundas as eco-savages and articulates a civilizing mission that shrinks the space for radical politics and effectively reproduces conditions for capitalist extraction and accumulation. While this may seem a fairly harsh indictment of indigenous rights activism and state-making in Jharkhand, Shah's critical ethnography is not condemnatory or dismissive of the possibility of an alternative indigenous politics. Indeed, her attempt to provide a sympathetic understanding of the tricky politics of indigenous rights reveals interesting similarities with postcolonial nation-state making efforts elsewhere in the world. Rather than being a space of cultural purity and autonomy from the modern Indian state, indigenous state-making in Jharkhand constantly forces concepts of indigeneity and modernity to rub up against each other and recognize indigent Mundas as traditional contemporaries also seeking possibilities for better futures beyond the shadows of the state.
In the Shadows of the State is a simple, engaging, and beautifully written book that makes a significant and original contribution to the global literature on the politics and practice of indigeneity, and to the rich body of critical geographical and anthropological research on tribal life and politics in Jharkhand and eastern India. It should be required reading for all scholars and activists committed to resolving the awkward relationship between indigeneity and indigence.
