Chapter 4 examines representations of tribal or adivasi movements by two of India’s best-known writers, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Roy’s creative non-fiction essay “Walking with the Comrades” ‘2011’ created a stir in India for its sympathetic portrayal of rebellious tribal activists. I maintain that Roy’s key inspiration is the earlier short story by Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi” ‘1978’. Describing a tribal woman leader Dopdi Mejhen, Devi’s story, translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is a widely anthologized text in postcolonial literature. However, the text’s global career fails to capture its complex history: this includes the Cold War and the contest between the Soviet and American-led blocs for regional hegemony in South Asia; the impact of antiwar peoples’ theater of the 1960s, including plays on Vietnam and the Black Panthers; and the tradition of progressive Bengali women’s fiction within which Devi is properly located. The chapter surveys the relationship between Devi’s Bengali-language story and Roy’s English-language essay through a host of little-known ‘to the Anglophone world’ intermediaries. In doing so, it demonstrates how various grassroots movements for the rights of adivasi and ethnic minorities continue to inflect creative non-fiction in the contemporary era.

This chapter begins with descriptions of different landscapes of alcohol production and consumption in Jharkhand and discusses how transactions of alcohol are tied up with social as well as cosmological and economic obligations for Adivasis. The latter half of the chapter describes how such transactions are subject to complex issues of regulation involving intersecting cosmologies and sovereignties. In particular, law and policing inflect transactional grammars of alcohol in Jharkhand and, in doing so, impinge on issues of livelihood - and existence itself - for many Adivasi families.

In the fifth chapter I discuss the more problematic ramifications of imagining “Natural Orissa” as a homogenous historical homeland. By 1924, the colonial government had begun earnestly discussing the formation of a separate province of Odisha, and in 1931 the Orissa Boundary Commission was established to delineate the territorial scope of the new province. The formation of a geographical Odisha involved several contradictions that had to be resolved. Perhaps the most significance was the presence of the many “tribal” (non-Odia-speaking, adivasi) communities, whose members comprised about one-fourth of the population of the proposed Odisha province. Through a reading of memoranda sent by various public organizations to the Orissa Boundary Commission I trace the developing justifications for the inclusion of adivasi communities into Odisha. Unsurprisingly, these justifications were largely based on claims about the exceptional ability of the “ancient” Odia community to absorb non-Odia populations into its fold. Couched in religious rhetoric, the memoranda display a paternalist civilizing discourse in which Odia-speaking people were presented as benevolent civilizers of the tribal communities. Such discourses were largely successful, as the diverse inhabitants of the region were subsumed into the emerging Odia political identity without being offered social parity.

In the postscript, I remark on the tenacity of the narratives of regional linguistic identity that were produced in the early twentieth century and the way in which elite justifications for a homogenous, Odia-speaking community came to transcend the sites of their production to take a central place in the nation’s imagination. Through a discussion of contemporary adivasi activism as part of the Maoist movement, adivasi opposition to economic liberalization as well as the controversies about Christian conversion of adivasis in Odisha, I show how the Odia appropriation of adivasi pasts remains the central problematic through which the struggles between the Odia mainstream majority and the adivasi minority are enacted.

Taking its title from Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s puzzling claim that the “Genius of India is to divide,” Chapter 6 tracks the career of linguistic difference in the making of modern India. I show how the effacement of adivasi pasts in the imagination of Odisha was mirrored in the way linguistic difference was managed through the language based division of Indian territory. I analyze writings on multilingualism by three influential leaders of the Indian nationalist movement–Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Representing three radically different perspectives on the question of language and nation, these writings allow me to track the passions, ideologies, and anxieties inherent in imagining a nation with multiple mother tongues. The chapter ends with a short discussion of the adivasi critique of linguistic provinces through a reading of speeches given by Jaipal Singh, the leader of the movement for the formation of the adivasi majority province of Jharkhand. The effacement of adivasi difference became established in both the imagination of modern Indian citizens and in the physical, territorial divisions of the emerging Indian nation. As vernacular languages became the foundational category for understanding representation and subjectivity in India, the concomitant exclusion of aboriginal peoples and the downplaying of alternative political possibilities were institutionalized into the very definition of the modern Indian community.