Adivasi field of contention, movement habitus, and political subjectivity: land struggles and political practices of Adivasis in Kerala, India

Abstract

The Adivasis, indigenous people in India, have historically constituted their subjectivity in and through insurgencies, armed resistances and protracted mobilisations against disenfranchising, dispossessing and displacing colonial and postcolonial regimes. The academic representations of their political subjectivity have often been caught up in a double bind between the cultural and the political primarily on account of disciplinary boundaries. Hence there is a need for unpacking Adivasi subjectivity for what it is. In Kerala, a southern state of India, the protracted socio-political mobilisation of Adivasis for land and resources have brought them into the epicentre of the political field. These mobilisations have been rendered by scholars as indigenist assertions of Adivasis that destabilise the edifice of Kerala Model of development and hollows out the class politics. Addressing the need to problematize the Adivasi subjectivity that is constituted in and through these land struggles, this research engages in an ethnographic investigation to unearth the dynamics that structures and reconstitutes it. Building a theoretical frame that interlocks the conceptual categories from Bourdieusian theoretical oeuvre, theories of social movement, subjectivity and reflexivity, this research unpacks the processes of structuring Adivasi field of contention, restructuring of the movement habitus, consolidation of relevant forms of capital and the reflexive reconstitution of the Adivasi subjectivity through the movement practices of the land struggle. This restructuring of the Adivasi habitus and reconstitution of their subjectivity, the data suggests, is enabling them to be strategic actors, albeit with ambivalences that mark their subjectivity, within the political field as they assert their political subjectivity and belonging.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Aneesh Joseph: orcid.org/0000-0002-3645-5395

ORCID for Bindi Shah: orcid.org/0000-0002-5571-9755

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