Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The paper attempts to critique scholarship on practices and norms of ‘representation’ in India and the ways in which Adivasis (Indigenous people) in India are represented in Indian texts (oral as well as written). In Louis Dumont’s work Homo Hierarchicus (1980), Adivasis are, in fact, placed as ‘the wretched of the earth’. Arguably the Adivasis of India have survived all the onslaughts perpetrated on them in the name of Indian culture and tradition. A study of the ‘Adivasi’ in Indian writing appears to contain very entrenched ideas especially those that we come across in Indian writing in English as well as in Indian writing in regional languages. In both mainstream written and visual texts, the image of the ‘Adivasi’ has acquired reified proportions in association with nature and oral culture. In my paper, I will attempt to argue that the Adivasi in India is reduced to an image, in many ways removed from her historical context, time and space, and made palatable for a primarily non-adivasi, elite, urban reader. The paper looks at how such conceptions of the adivasi subject are rather dismissive while failing to accommodate the diverse and tenacious relationships among tribes, as demographic units as well as communities, maintained within society at large. The paper delves into the representations of Adivasis within Indian writing and demonstrates how such representations are rife with politics and prejudices.