A new visibility and an amplified resonance have recently marked the predicament of tribal India. The category of indigeneity has begun to elicit an intellectual theorization located at the crossroads of diverse disciplinary fields, spanning social sciences, literary criticism, media and artistic studies. Peoples who define themselves in terms of free access to natural resources, communitarian knowledges and place-based solidarities, are seen in their challenge to the narrations both of the colonial and the postcolonial state. Their presence in modernizing, increasingly anglophone, India is disturbing the logic of neoliberal globalization no less than that of liberal citizenship.
Problematic as it is to bring together under the label ‘Adivasi’ a very heterogeneous corpus of cultural manifestations we have tentatively used this label as a working functional umbrella in order to, however partially, contribute to the mapping of the complex reality of tribal India.