Abstract
This recent and welcome volume attempts to address a significant gap in the literature on social movements in India. Moving away from an earlier trend of classificatory concerns, its call for a ‘new materialist ontological framework’ (p. 7) is a refreshing and productive approach to the analysis of how and why resistance takes the form that it does, how identities are forged and mobilised in this process, and how movement claims-making and discourses take the shape that they do. Moving away from an intellectually imposed division between materialist and cultural claims-making within movements, the strength of the proposed approach lies in bringing the cultural and the material into a dialectical relationship with each other such that we arrive at a historical, constructed and contingent understanding of resistance, social movements and the processes of mobilisation. In doing this, the contributors attempt to bridge the divide between the seemingly antagonistic scholarship of Marxists and non-Marxists, particularly post-structuralists and postcolonialists; they also bring the political economy perspective into dialogue with discursive analyses. The book is divided into three sections, each centred on a key question that the authors collectively seek to answer. First, how do claims around dispossession take on simultaneously cultural and material forms? Second, how do contemporary mobilisational and organisational processes influence the shape of movement discourses and the nature of political subjectivities thus mobilised within movements? Finally, how are academics to situate themselves vis-à-vis these movements?
The first section is titled ‘Transcending Nature/Culture’ and it engages with struggles and subaltern politics that centre on control over natural resources. Demystifying the question of ‘nature’ as a priori, the chapters in this section trace particular trajectories of political formations and discourses around a politics of nature. While Nilsen’s chapter on the rise and fall of the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan in Madhya Pradesh points to the emergence of newly-conscious subjects who successfully forge a ‘vernacular rights culture’ (p. 49) around access to forest resources, Shutzer’s chapter on forest resources, community rights and the politics of indigeneity examines how discourses of indigeneity and sustainability find meaning through concrete processes of negotiation between the state, community and NGOs. Karlsson, on the other hand, reconfigures the very notion of resistance and agency in the context of the movement against the Mapithel dam in Manipur, constituted by acts of ‘endurance’ in the absence of active forms of resistance in the most recent phase of the struggle.
Challenging the given-ness of resistance in a particular context, the second section, ‘Structures and Subjectivities’, takes the discussion forward by examining political subjectivities as they are forged within processes of mobilisation. Each of the three chapters in this section contributes towards understanding identities mobilised within movements as deeply contingent and rooted in material conditions and local social relations, be it in the symbols, icons or history called forth by the All India Agricultural Labour Association in Bihar, the particular contours of an adivasi identity as articulated within the Adivasi Gotra Mahasabha in Kerala, critically inscribed by the changing political economy of the region or the manner in which class–caste relations between agricultural labour and landowners shaped the politics of the anti-land acquisition movement in Singur, West Bengal. Such a framework breaks from past traditions of assuming coherence and unanimity within social movements to ask who, within so-called ‘local communities’ protests and through what motivation? Who is silenced? How and why do self-representations change? And how does all this influence the shape of a movement?
The final section, ‘Power, Knowledge, Action’, addresses the question of the politics of knowledge production and emphasises the relationship between activists and researchers. This section is all the more relevant and central in the study of social movements today, where particular analyses in turn have the potential to influence a movement in concrete and substantial ways. That this issue finds a place in this collected volume is worth noting and appreciating, being an arena that requires far more concerted work in India. The section attempts to put academic voices in dialogue with activist voices around the thematic of indigenous politics and forest rights. The chapters together delve into the everyday-ness of political processes that shape movement claims, including the concrete negotiations of social movements with existing power structures mediated by a range of actors and institutions. However, the nature of the relationship between knowledge produced in starkly academic spaces vis-à-vis that produced in activist/movement spaces remains under-explored as the chapters appear as stand-alone formulations with little interaction with each other. For instance, Padel’s framing of academic concerns with ecological romanticism has little dialogue with Karak’s engagement with decolonisation in the context of adivasis and the politics of indigeneity in India. Similarly, while Vaidya’s chapter on the Forest Rights Act and the negotiations that went into framing the law, recounts the political landscape within which this process took place, it does not speak to Gopalakrishnan’s chapter on assessing resource struggles in forest regions, even though the latter was a critical figure in the negotiations Vaidya recounts.
Even as the book sets about a promising agenda, it falls somewhat short of all that it claims to do. While its concern of bridging the intellectual divide between Marxists and most significantly post-structuralists through a call for a materialist ontology is central to the endeavour, the chapters remain broadly divided along these lines. That is to say, the collection of chapters, more than presenting a comprehensive approach that brings the different strands together, remains one where individual authors employ one or another strand, but are placed together in one volume. In this process, even as the book makes important headway in further developing a robust theoretical framework for the study of social movements, the divide it seeks to bridge between different theoretical traditions is reproduced to some extent in the chapters. Further, in an intellectual culture where dialogues such as the one proposed in the volume between academic and activist voices are much needed, the book falls short of substantively taking on this task, while nevertheless beginning to address some of the concerns of articulating concepts within social movements in an overtly political context with serious consequences for communities in struggle.
In sum, the book is a critical work in the study of social movements in India. The theoretical framework it develops through the various chapters, tied together by a review essay at the end of each section, is a productive approach that has the potential to spur rigorous and grounded work on social movements in the future.