Abstract
Since 2017, adivasi (South Asian Indigenous) communities in Jharkhand, India have put up large stone slabs known as pathals at their village entrances. These pathals reaffirm their independence from the Jharkhandi and Indian states and their opposition to the extraction of coveted resources on their lands by corporations and state authorities. Participating communities have established their own self-defense committees, banks, and schools, defying calls for assimilation through development. The Pathalgadi Movement, as it has become known, illustrates the complexities of contemporary anti-globalization: a far cry from the respectable professionalized trappings of the World Social Forum, it shows how Indigenous and otherwise oppressed populations across the world are combating the mounting crises of neoliberal extractivism, dispossession, and displacement and accompanying state repression and societal marginalization, at the same time as this resistance is replete with contradictions that could prove its undoing. This paper details the insights into messy anti-globalization offered by the Pathalgadi Movement. Drawing upon interviews with Jharkhandi activists and numerous news reports, it contends that the Movement emerged as a response to rampant neoliberal Hindu nationalism, embodying a collective alternative that Arturo Escobar describes in terms of ontological politics. Due in no small part to the Movement’s subversion of liberal rationality, Jharkhandi civil society has generally lagged behind its maneuvers, if not expressing open hostility to its militant reinterpretation of adivasi tradition. However, these maneuvers are not purely emancipatory: while useful for confounding state authorities, the Movement’s ideological amorphousness threatens to undermine the construction of a broader revolutionary project.
Presenters
Pratik RaghuStudent, PhD Candidate in Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Anti-globalization, Hindu Nationalism, India, Indigenous Peoples, Social Movements
