Alpa Shah

In the shadows of the state : indigenous politics, environmentalism, and insurgency in Jharkhand, India

In the Shadows of the State suggests that well-meaning indigenous rights and development claims and interventions may misrepresent and hurt the very people they intend to help. It is a powerful critique based on extensive ethnographic research in Jharkhand, a state in eastern India officially created in 2000. While the realization of an independent Jharkhand was the culmination of many years of local, regional, and transnational activism for the rights of the region’s culturally autonomous indigenous people, Alpa Shah argues that the activism unintentionally further marginalized the region’s poorest people. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in Jharkhand, she follows the everyday lives of some of the poorest villagers as they chase away protected wild elephants, try to cut down the forests they allegedly live in harmony with, maintain a healthy skepticism about the revival of the indigenous governance system, and seek to avoid the initial spread of an armed revolution of Maoist guerrillas who claim to represent them. Juxtaposing these experiences with the accounts of the village elites and the rhetoric of the urban indigenous-rights activists, Shah reveals a class dimension to the indigenous-rights movement, one easily lost in the cultural-based identity politics that the movement produces. In the Shadows of the State brings together ethnographic and theoretical analyses to show that the local use of global discourses of indigeneity often reinforces a class system that harms the poorest people. Show more Show less

Markets of Protection: The Terrorist Maoist Movement and the State in Jharkhand, India

This article explores the continuities between the local state and the ‘terrorist’ extreme left-wing armed guerrilla Naxalite movement, the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), in Jharkhand, Eastern India. The article shows how the MCC gained grassroots support by having greater control over a ‘market of protection’, and not through a shared ideology. This protection is a ‘doubleedged commodity’ – it is protection to access the informal economy of the state but also protection from the possibilities of the protector’s activities. In selling protection, the MCC competes in a market previously controlled by the state. The MCC increases its control over the market as an idea of its immense power – as well as fear of the organization, emerging from both its visible and invisible qualities, including its propensity for violence – is created among its targets. Unveiling this market of protection demonstrates the contested boundaries between the state and the ‘terrorist’ in rural Jharkhand.

Morality, Corruption and the State: Insights from Jharkhand, Eastern India

Abstract Corruption is analysed by addressing the interrelations between the moral and political economy regulating state-based welfare provision in Jharkhand, India. On the one hand, the article focuses on the rural elite to show that ‘corrupt’ practices are not just guided by financial utility but also by non-material interests, underpinned by a multivarious moral economy. On the other hand, the article shows that the poorest in the rural areas (adivasis or Scheduled Tribes) keep away from the state, seeing it as beyond the moral pale, and instead resurrect an alternative sovereign structure. The adivasi perspectives are influenced by a political economy of historical experiences of the state and interrelations with the elites. The paper concludes that a particular political economy is intimately connected with a moral economy, and that transformations in political economy affect the moral economy.

Introduction: the underbelly of the Indian boom

Max Weber, well known as the author of Economy and society (1978), is perhaps less well known for declaring in his The religion of India that Hinduism in general is ‘characterised by a dread of the magical evil of innovation’ (1981, p. 162). No one would write in these terms today when India is widely acclaimed as a beacon of high-tech modernity, nor, of course, should Weber have written in such terms 100 years ago. Today, the work of presenting Shining India to a global audience is performed as much by domestic boosters like Gurcharan Das or Bollywood stars such as Amitabh Bachchan as it is by visiting US commentators like Thomas Friedman. The suspicion remains, nonetheless, that the emerging contradictions of rapid growth in post-1980 India are poorly diagnosed by narratives of developmentalism which hide as much as they reveal. Talk of India being, or shortly becoming, a major economic power, just as much as the focus on flashy dollar billionaires who are rising in India at the rate of 17 per year, blithely disregards the fact that more than 800 million Indians continue to survive on less than

The intimacy of insurgency: beyond coercion, greed or grievance in Maoist India

2 a day, or that just eight Indian states have more poor people than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together (Alkire & Santos, 2010). A journey from Delhi to Kolkata still takes a traveller through the global epicentre of extreme income poverty. Close to 450 million Indians are forced to subsist on less than

Introduction: a double-edged sword: protection and state violence

1.25 a day in purchasing power parity terms which is where the World Bank now draws its international poverty line many of them living in the fertile Gangetic plain. Almost all of these people use a precarious mix of livelihood strategies to make ends meet. They variously engage in small-scale farming, risky and poorly paid contract wage labour,

Alcoholics Anonymous: the Maoist movement in Jharkhand, India

Abstract The Maoist movement has been presented as one of the most powerful forces of resistance against policies of economic liberalization in India. This paper explores how and why the movement has spread in recent years. Analysing beyond theories explaining insurgent action in terms of coercion, greed or grievance, the article draws on long-term ethnographic research in a Maoist guerrilla zone to explore an important aspect of mobilization that has been underplayed to date in the literature: the relations of intimacy which develop between the mobilizing forces and the people in the area of struggle. The paper shows how bonds of family and kinship, exchange and its expectations, caste and its manifestations are crucial for understanding the social dynamics of revolutionary mobilization. Moreover, it suggests that the relationship between ideology and political organization is significant in shaping the kinds of relations of intimacy developed, and that in turn this can explain the reach of the organization. In the Indian case, the paper thus compares the spread of the Maoists with competing political organizations in their guerrilla zones – the Indian State and the Hindu right. Just as relations of intimacy may help explain why people support and join radical movements, the paper suggests that their conflictual relationship with revolutionary subjectivity may also become the Achilles’ heel of such movements, explaining why people distance themselves from, leave and betray them, leading in part to their decline.

‘The muck of the past’: revolution, social transformation, and the Maoists in India†

The Anglo-American led ‘war on terror’ has generated heated debates over the role of the state in protecting its citizen-subjects from internal and external threats. States have taken supposedly exceptional measures against perceived dangers by launching wars, overthrowing regimes and curtailing civil liberties in the name of ‘security’. At the same time, these supposedly exceptional measures have been seen by many people as destabilizing sources of oppression in their own right. While the second war in Iraq was launched in the name of restoring international order and overthrowing an undoubtedly brutal dictator, it has also brought disorder and violence into the lives of many people in the region. Similarly, while immigration controls have been tightened in the name of security, they have also brought discrimination, abuse and harassment. In this context, the measures taken by many regimes in order to protect their citizen-subjects have also created disorder, fear and violence. Recent anthropological work on the relationships between those who speak in the name of the state and their citizen-subjects has explored the ways in which forms of rule are often produced through forceful and violent imposition, rather than straightforward consent (Das and Poole, 2004; Hansen and Stepputat, 2005). Consent to govern is given often as much for reasons of fear as it is freely chosen. Many states are formed through histories of pacification, forced assimilation and exclusion rather than the stabilizing actions of ‘civil society’. This work has made a useful and important contribution by exploring ethnographically how both seemingly ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ states are founded on violence, and depend on fear and coercion to carry out many of their most fundamental tasks (Heyman, 1999). The articles found here join in this project, and were first presented at a workshop held jointly by the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College and the Crisis States Programme of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The participants were asked to examine, among other things, how states use violence in the pursuit of control and legitimacy. In this collection, we explore one aspect of the state and its relationship to violence – the everyday experiences, manifestations and effects of the state as both a source of violence and as a provider of protection from violence – paying attention to the shifting ends of state violence as well as its means. The articles do so through in-depth examination of case studies ranging from Article

The tensions over liberal citizenship in a Marxist revolutionary situation: the Maoists in India

From millenarian movements to the spread of Hindu rightwing militancy, attacks on adivasi (or tribal) consumption of alcohol have gone hand-in-hand with the project of ‘civilizing the savage’. Emphasizing the agency and consciousness of adivasi political mobilization, subaltern studies scholarship has historically depicted adivasis as embracing and propelling these reformist measures, marking them as a challenge to the social structure. This paper examines these claims through an analysis of the relationship between alcohol and the spread of the Maoist insurgency in Jharkhand, Eastern India. Similar to other movements of adivasi political mobilization, an anti-drinking campaign is part of the Maoist spread in adivasi areas. This paper makes an argument for focusing on the internal diversity of adivasi political mobilization—in particular intergenerational and gender conflicts—emphasizing the differentiated social meanings of alcohol consumption (and thus of prohibition), as well as the very different attitudes taken by adivasis towards the Maoist campaign. The paper thus questions the binaries of ‘sanskritisation’ versus adivasis assertion that are prevalent in subaltern studies scholarship, proposing an engagement with adivasi internal politics that could reveal how adivasi political mobilization contains the penetrations of dominant sanskritic values, limitations to those penetrations and other aspirations, such as the desire for particular notions of modernity.

Ethnography? Participant observation, a potentially revolutionary praxis

This article analyses revolutionary social change by exploring how people attempt to create a radically different future by taking action in the present, and the challenges that beset this transformation. Examining the relationship between the future, the present, and the past, the article takes the case of the spread of armed underground Maoist guerrillas in India to ask two questions: First, why does India hang on to this form of utopianism when the rest of the world appears to have abandoned it? Second, how and why does the ‘muck of the past’ influence the production of a radically different future? In answering these questions, this article suggests that for both processes of radical social change and our theories of them, we need to reinsert our analyses of politico-economic conditions into our ideologies of social change.