Tucked away in a corner of eastern India, the forest-covered Chotanagpur Plateau lies at the heart of the state of Jharkhand today. As a graduate student in a political science department, I sought to learn about the Maoist insurgency raging in the region, which formed a part of the so-called Red Corridor across eastern and central India.
Why were they taking up arms against the Indian state? How did this insurgent group mobilize rural populations? Living among the Mundas in their ancestral lands in Khunti district, I listened to the stories and songs of my interlocutors. Anil, Joachim, Kalyan, Gomia, and others who opened their homes to me so graciously also taught me how to speak and think in the Mundari language.
Their families, especially the children, took a special delight in teaching me common words for flora and fauna as well as proverbs and idioms that made the language come alive for me. At times, my fieldwork took place, quite literally, in the fields, where the staple paddy dhaan crop is cultivated in the state. At other times, a smorgasbord of seasonal festivities and ritual ceremonies kept me busy as an ethnographer.
She gave me not only a place in her household and community but also a sense of belonging to a place that is now a home to me. This book, written by a rogue political scientist among historians and anthropologists, does not, however, tell a romantic tale of defeated heroes and lost arcadias.
Eager to establish their political authority in the region, colonial and postcolonial regimes have had little choice but to work with representatives of rural adivasi communities. But Mundas and other adivasi groups such as Oraons, Santals, and Hos have not been left untouched by their clear-eyed negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states over the past two centuries. It treats adivasis not as atavistic Others or vestiges from the prehistoric past but as fully coeval with the rest of us as moderns seeking rights and recognition.
