1 - Revisiting the Aryan debate: Representations of Adivasi Pasts in Jharkhand

The paper investigates how the idea of the Aryan invasion has been appropriated by various indigenous communities or Adivasi of contemporary Jharkhand to assert their indigeneity and to re-inscribe themselves within the nation’s history. Challenging mainstream narratives, the margins today, both as sites of resistance and of repression, clamour to narrate their own past and present experiences. These ‘minority histories’ and ‘subaltern pasts’ form part of the contemporary struggles for inclusion and self-representation, ideologically linked to the national, regional and sectarian politics of India.

The paper analyses the writings of British colonial scholars, like E.T. Dalton and W.W. Hunter, who came to represent the ancient history of the region as a clash of two civilisations, the superior Aryan and the culturally inferior aboriginal. In doing so, they drew upon the hegemonic early Indian Sanskrit texts which portrayed the forest-dweller as the fearsome ‘other’ of civilization, an idea which continue to inform popular attitudes today. In their counter-narratives, Adivasi politicians and historians argue that Adivasis were the real Indians who inhabited the land prior to the Aryans and who had to give way to the advancing ‘Aryan hordes’. They further argue that the Aryans destroyed Adivasi culture and created the stereotype of the wild and fierce demonic forest-dwellers to justify their slaughter, degradation and humiliation, a process continued by the Mughals, the British, as well as the post- Independence state, depriving Adivasis not only of their land, but also their tradition and identity.