“Tribes” appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as “tribal” have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by “subaltern” groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India.

Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-à-vis negotiations with the modern state, rather than its negation, over the past two centuries.

This book asks for a rethinking and rewriting of the political history of modern India from its “tribal” margins.

Uday Chandra is Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University, Qatar.

“This theoretically ambitious historical ethnography neatly displaces many of the central analytic categories by which indigenous people have been seen by state officials, scholars, politicians, and development workers, portraying them instead as modern subjects who co-produce the state on its margins . . .  A magnificent achievement”
AKHIL GUPTA

“An illuminating and engaging longue durée account of everyday resistance and state-making in the Chotanagpur plateau of Jharkhand”
SANJIB BARUAH