The eastern state of Jharkhand in India has been the site of contention between Adivasi communities, like the Munda, and the national government. This is a relationship between these communities and centralized, outside power that has existed for centuries in different forms. To understand this ongoing conflict, we need to understand the root causes of contention. Various scholars have traced this to a general rejection by Adivasis of State-sanctioned neoliberal development projects like land-grabbing and mining. I analyze, based on a fifteen month long ethnographic study conducted from May 2017 to December 2018, the meaning of land for the Munda community, and how these meanings underlie the Adivasi-State conflict, based on several forms of qualitative data. I argue that at the core of this ongoing conflict lie questions of identity construction and representation, neoliberal market forces, gender, and a historical narrative of resistance against outsiders. Importantly, to best understand Adivasi politics and their relationship to their local environment, one must actively listen to how these communities represent themselves. / Doctor of Philosophy / The eastern state of Jharkhand in India has been the site of an ongoing conflict between the Munda Adivasi (indigenous) community and the State. This contentious relationship has existed for several centuries and continues until now. Various scholars describe the conflict as the general rejection of the attempts of State and corporate actors to grab lands in order to carry out neoliberal development projects such as mining and hydroelectricity dams in the region. I analyze, based on a fifteen-month long ethnographic study conducted from May 2017 to December 2018, the meaning of land for the Munda community, and how these meanings underlie the Adivasi-State conflict. I argue that the current ongoing conflict underlie questions of identity construction and representation embedded in the historical narrative of resistance against outsiders. More specifically, one must understand the subaltern communities, such as the Munda Adivasi, through their discourses.

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Thesis Ph. D.--Bodhgaya--Magadh University, 2004. / Bibliogr. p. [163]-171.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Theatre, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 92-96).

The protagonists of the novel, Vedantika Ojha (12) and Cyka Ho (13), meet when the latter starts working as a domestic help in the former’s house. They live in a conflict-ridden town in India which is the site of one of the world’s longest ongoing guerilla rebellions, the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency. The girls seem to have little in common. Vedantika resides in a big house with razor spikes on the boundary walls. She is a queer neurodivergent 7th grader who has unstable relationships with everyone, including the reader. Cyka, who lives in the slums, is confident and charming. She stands up for herself because she knows that no one else will. She is all too familiar with the violent streets that Vedantika has so far been sheltered from. However, a closer look reveals that the girls share an absence. Cyka’s family was displaced from their village due to coal mining. She belongs to one of the indigenous tribes who have historically co-existed with nature without capitalizing on its resources. But their lands are now being taken over by the neoliberal government. Her people must revolt to survive. On the other hand, Vedantika’s mother has left her family to take up a job in Delhi. While Cyka pines for her village, Vedantika pines for her mother. Their respective losses become the basis of the bond that develops between them despite their dissimilar contexts.

The study of the relationship between Hindu nationalism and Hindu activist traditions of seva (selfless service) has been principally organised into three approaches: firstly, the instrumentalist deployment of the practice, secondly, the political appropriation of traditions of seva, and thirdly, that these related associational spaces are internally homogenous and distinct from alternative ‘legitimate’ religious arenas. These frameworks largely reflect approaches to Hindu nationalism which place emphasis on its forms of political statecraft and relationship to spectacular violence. These approaches raise manifold concerns. This thesis retheorizes the relationship between Hindu nationalism and seva with reference to primary and secondary sources, together with field research in the seva projects of the Vanavasi Kalyan Kendra (VKK), a Hindu nationalist association. Through deploying a reworked understanding of Fraser’s (1990) approach to associational space and Butler’s (1993, 2007) theorisation of performative acts and subject formation, this thesis contributes to rethinking Hindu nationalism and seva. I demonstrate firstly that the colonial encounter worked to produce a series of social imaginaries which were drawn upon to transform traditions of seva. Through their articulation in shared religious languages, practices of seva were productive of porously structured Hindu activist spaces in which the tradition was contested with regard to ‘radical’ and ‘orthodox’ orientations to Hinduism’s boundaries. Increasingly, articulations of seva which invoked a sangathanist ‘orthodoxy’ came to gain hegemony in Hindu activist arenas. This influenced the early and irregular Hindu nationalist practices of seva. Fractures in Hindu nationalist articulations developed as a result of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) sangathanist organisational idioms, allowing the association to inscribe its practices with pro-active meanings. In the post-independence period the alternative arenas of Hindu nationalist seva projects expanded greatly, a point evident in the degrees of dialogue between the Sangh and the sarvodaya movement. The importance of porous associational boundaries is further demonstrated through noting how engagement in visibilized arenas of popular Hindu religiosity worked to both broaden the fields of reference and vernacularize Hindu nationalist practices of seva. With reference to field research, I demonstrate that central to the expansion of the VKK’s arenas of service into spaces associated with Ayurvedic care is the incorporation of both refocused and transgressive practices. In the educational projects of the VKK, I note how seva works to inscribe daily practices of hygiene, the singing of bhajans and daily assemblies with Hindu nationalist meanings, and so works to regulate conduct through the formation of an ‘ethical Hindu self’. However, arenas of seva are also a location where we can witness subjects negotiating power. I demonstrate this through examining how participants in the VKK’s rural development projects rearticulate Othering practices of seva, with actors using the discourse to position themselves as active subjects, break gendered restrictions on public space, and advance an ‘ethically Hindu’ grounded claim on development and critique of power. This work illustrates that far from being of inconsequence to the circulation of Hindu nationalist identities, alternative arenas of seva operate as spaces where discourses are performatively enacted, refocused, transgressed and rearticulated. These acts contribute to the consolidation and disturbance of Hindu nationalist subject formations.