Roots Unearthed: the Symbiosis of Indigeneity and the Environment. Framing the history of Adivasis marginalization and resilience in India’s environmental history

Abstract

The file rouge of this essay will be the analysis of the symbiotic relationship between indigenous people and the environment, with a particular focus on the experience of marginalization of these communities within the framework of Indian environmental history. Even if many attempts of critique and deconstruction in the academic arena have been made, indigeneity is a term still irrorated with a strongly negative connotation related to colonially derived discourses on marginalization, development, and progress. Moreover, climate change and global warming are impacting not only the natural systems but humans as well. Externalities have always existed, both positive and negative, however, their impacts are now more than before potentially harmful to humanity and the planet overall, because everything is hyperconnected and rapidly spread, even if not in an equal and uniform way. Indigenous people, who base their livelihoods almost exclusively on the natural resources surrounding them, such as forests, are among the most affected victims. The first chapter will explore the recent attempts to reconsider and somehow break down the bond between the human and the non-human, projecting our world through a post-human approach that takes seriously the non-human presence. In more recent times anthropological inquiry has been nourished by a renovated lymph, and the anthropocentric focus has been redirected towards new trajectories which try to emphasize and cultivate the human-nonhuman relationship of proximity. An overview of the current global climate situation and of the Indian geological, climatic, and ecological roots will be proposed. The second chapter will focus on the concept of indigeneity and its ramifications in the international and Indian political discourse. During both colonial and post-colonial times, the lives of Adivasis communities have been questioned and repeatedly oppressed. Nowadays, tribals are almost everywhere constitutionally recognized, however, their inclusion as marginalized is simultaneously at odds with democratic politics, both in theory and in practice. Thus, they negotiate their marginality every day both at the national and transnational level fighting not only for substantial economic prosperity but also for their freedom from a legacy and actual situation of domination and dispossession. The third chapter will deepen the understanding of the nature and role of traditional/indigenous environmental knowledge and practices as a global phenomenon and then specifically referred to the millennial Indian tradition. Successively, it will be worthy to explore the conflictual relationship between indigenous ecological knowledge and the idea of progress and development and the forest policies implemented during the colonial and post-colonial era. This mutually impactful and sometimes conflictual relationship has relevant effects on the lives of local communities and in the worst cases culminated with the forced relocation of tribes in the name of the protection of the environment. Then, it will enlighten the pivotal but neglected role of indigenous people in the resistance struggle against the attempts of oppression and dismantling of their socio-economic traditional system by Indian governmental authorities. The fourth and last chapter, illustrates the case study of the Baiga tribe who inhabit the state of Chhattisgarh, trying to analyze how they live in their space of marginalization and cope with the conflict over mainstream development and movements for dignity and freedom. An insight into the debate about the dispossession and relocation actions that the Indian authorities are pursuing, in the name of natural conservation, against indigenous people, particularly the Baiga tribe, will be introduced.