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Articles by Bhangya BhukyaSubscribe to Bhangya Bhukya

Unveiling the World of the Nomadic Tribes and Denotified Tribes: An Introduction

Vol. 56, Issue No. 36, 04 Sep, 2021
31 August 2021 marks the 69th year of the repeal of the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. This act was the most draconian law passed by the British colonial state, under which millions of nomadic and semi-nomadic communities were declared criminals and put under continuous surveillance, making their lives impossible. 31 August is celebrated as Vimukta Jatis day in India by the de-notified tribal communities. After denotification in 1952, about 200 communities were included in Scheduled Tribe (ST), Scheduled Caste (SC) and Other Backward Caste lists because they come from diverse social backgrounds. While they mainly come from nomadic communities, these communities are not homogeneous. All nomadic tribes (NTs) are not de-notified tribes (DNTs), but all DNTs are NTs. Given the historically embedded diversities between the NTs and DNTs, it is difficult to treat them as a homogeneous social group or an analytical category (Renke 2008: 8–20). They are fluid categories which often cross boundaries from one social group to another.

Featuring Adivasi/Indigenous Studies

Vol. 56, Issue No. 25, 19 Jun, 2021
Bhangya Bhukya

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The Lost Ground

Vol. 55, Issue No. 14, 04 Apr, 2020
Bhangya Bhukya

The Adivasis of India have a long history of collective community rights over forest resources and land. The colonial state revenue and forest regulations replaced these community collective rights with the individual property rights, which ceased Adivasi free access to resources and evicted them from their land by force. To undo the historical wrongs, the postcolonial state had intervened with a programme of “right approach” under which Adivasi rights over forest resources and land was ensured. But, this was again stalled by its institutions and legal system. Thus, we need to think about Adivasi collective rights beyond the state legal framework which can ensure them free use of resources in forests and hills.

Browsing through 51 Years of EPW | The Mapping of the Adivasi Social: Colonial Anthropology and Adivasis

During the colonial era, a range of disparate groups that lived for the most part in the more inaccessible hill and forest tracts, and survived largely from hunting and gathering or rudimentary swidden agriculture, were categorised by the British as “aboriginals” or “early tribes”. They were distinguished by their clan-based systems of kinship and their “animistic” religious beliefs. Sometimes, they were defined in terms of their habitat, as “jungle tribes”. In this way, a category was created, and a body of knowledge produced, about the so-called “tribes of India”. In the process, scattered...

Widening the Frames of Subaltern Studies

Vol. 52, Issue No. 4, 28 Jan, 2017
Bhangya Bhukya

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015; pp x + 318, ₹850.

Between Tradition and Modernity

Vol. 48, Issue No. 48, 30 Nov, 2013
Bhangya Bhukya

The British colonial state in India ensured that the princely states were picturised as backward enclaves that kept alive an older feudal polity characterised by autocracy and underdevelopment, while British India moved towards modernity and capitalist development. However, the reality was that while the princes appeared superficially to enshrine an exotic Oriental past in their courtly and private life, the general development was carried out on the line of the colonial model. The ideological boundaries between the princely states and British territories were fluid and there was visible cross-pollination between the sociocultural and political issues and movements of the two territories. In fact, the colonial state used a number of methods to produce the effect of colonial power in the princely states. The coastal Andhra ruling class has continued a similar strategy after the formation of Andhra Pradesh state in order to subordinate the people of Telangana.

The Mapping of the Adivasi Social: Colonial Anthropology and Adivasis

Vol. 43, Issue No. 39, 27 Sep, 2008
Bhangya Bhukya

The construction of textual knowledge about Indian communities in the colonial milieu resulted in an extensive literature on almost all communities that was not only used as a source of legal and general administration but also to establish colonial domination. In this process the adivasis of India were constructed apposite to civilised society, therefore a distinct society. Unfortunately, post-colonial scholarship did not decolonise this colonial construction of adivasi society

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