(De)Constructing a ‘backward’ identity in an area of civil unrest in India

Gunjan Wadhwa
Centre for International Education, University of Sussex

This paper will explore the discursive construction of identity of the Adivasi (indigenous / ‘tribal’) people in India, with specific reference to the Gond community of Vidarbha region. The paper is about locating the research participants of this PhD research and analysing what is thought of them in the policy and community context. The constitution of a ‘tribal’ and ‘backward’ identity through power and discourse as well as its inculcation and embodiment is explored. The analysis is framed by post-structural, post-colonial and feminist theorization of the data that comprised selected policy texts from the period of colonial administration and the current Indian State, alongside the excerpts from focus groups and interviews held with the participants of this research including the Gonds themselves. The paper is based on the first stage of analysis carried out as part of the PhD research in Vidarbha for over six months. It explores the discourses of differentiation and how language is used to produce difference, distinction and hierarchy among groups of people inhabiting a Maoist-insurgency affected area in a postcolonial context. The physical and social isolation and entrapment of the Gonds through language and the entwining of their identity with the space that they inhabit produces them as ‘backward’, ‘scheduled’, ‘excluded’ and ‘primitive’ in the dominant discourse in India. The purpose of this paper is to show the discursive separation between the Gonds and the others in the country, imposition of a hierarchy through the colonial and post-independence policies and the geographical marking of India that laid the basis of governance as it exists today and of the civil unrest or the Maoist insurgency. The work of this paper (still under progress) would fit well under the theme ‘Social movements, indigenous knowledges and collective learning’ since it problematises the established notions of education and literacy and offers a critique of the modernization and development discourse prevalent in India at the time of this research.