Genealogies of indigeneity

The global circulation of the discourse of indigeneity and its entrance into national and international polities implies particular consequences. First, indigeneity presupposes a collective consciousness of the workings of politics among those who claim to be indigenous. It involves a strategic application of the principle of indigenous self-definition in order to be recognized and, thus, enclosed into the hegemonic framework of globalized indigeneity.Footnote ³⁰ As a result, indigenous leaders and spokespersons articulate political claims for legal rights and collective recognition in dominant Western frameworks.Footnote ³¹ Kuper's ground-breaking and widely contested critique of the ‘return of the native’ as ‘indigenous’—accordingly, a reinvention of the nineteenth-century notion of the ‘primitive’—highlights ethical disputes over who and why someone may or may not be recognized as indigenous.Footnote ³² The term ‘Indigenous Peoples’ is equally contested because it represents communities affected by differing regional and national contexts, in which ‘travelling models’ of indigenous voice assume ambiguous and often contradictory meanings.Footnote ³³

Second, the idea of indigeneity is frequently understood as essentially pre-modern;Footnote ³⁴ it is thus posed as a counter-discourse to modernity by non-indigenous actors who romanticize indigenous peoples as ‘different’, ‘exotic’, and ‘close to nature’. Such ‘otherings’ have influenced the political language of indigeneity as it is used by vocal indigenous and non-indigenous actors, who instrumentalize the discourse of indigeneity in order to voice their particular interests.Footnote ³⁵ For example, they appropriate the image of Native Americans as ‘natural’ conservationists in order to bring forward arguments about property rights, sovereignty, cultural pride, and ethical superiority.Footnote ³⁶

Terms relating to indigeneity in the here-and-now have specific genealogies on the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ³⁷ Since the early days of colonialism, communities living outside the spectre of caste society were surveyed, classified, ordered, dominated, and ruled by marking them as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’.Footnote ³⁸ During different periods, a variety of modern neologisms have come to assume particular historical trajectories.Footnote ³⁹ The term ‘tribe’ gained major traction when the British transferred the concept from their African colonies to the administrative language of the Raj;Footnote ⁴⁰ here, ‘tribe’ was sharply distinguished from ‘caste’ and viewed as lower in the hierarchy.Footnote ⁴¹ The administrative category of the tribe—which came to be enmeshed in the Criminal Tribes Act, declared in 1871—was eventually applied to classify and fix the previously more fluid identifications of a large variety of often mobile non-caste groups, among them hunting and gathering, herding, fishing, and farming communities.Footnote ⁴² All those who did not fit the British vision of creating a legible, taxable, and governable colonial subject, and who were regarded as marginal to mainstream society and state structures, should ideally be embedded in a sedentary, ordered, and disciplined society consisting of legible communities that fulfil certain roles in a local division of labour.Footnote ⁴³

The discourses of savagery and aboriginality, ascribed in different capacities to native subjects, especially to tribal populations, played a primary role in establishing colonial rule and its labour market economy.Footnote ⁴⁴ The first—savagery—served as a counterpoint to the self-imagination of the colonial state as harbinger of ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’. In the Raj, ideas of savagery were, among others, linked to the notion of an ‘inhospitable forest environment’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The British were aiming to transform such ‘savage’ environments—‘jungles’ that were perceived as ‘wastelands’, ‘wilderness’, or ‘unproductive’, especially as they were inhabited by Indigenous PeoplesFootnote ⁴⁶—into supposedly productive, civilized, and morally ordered zones of agricultural and industrial production. The notion of aboriginality, in turn, is a colonial-modern paradigm that evolved out of the settler-colonial experience of the Americas and Antipodes, where white colonizers annihilated and dispossessed peoples marked as racially different.Footnote ⁴⁷ In South Asia, the discourse of aboriginality came to be closely intertwined with capitalist developments in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁸ Aboriginality provided the ideological groundwork for the commercial transportation of aboriginal ‘coolies’, like the Ranchis, as indentured labour to overseas destinations,Footnote ⁴⁹ as well as across the subcontinent (for example, Bihar, Bengal, Assam, and Andamans) to erect plantations and colonial infrastructures.Footnote ⁵⁰ The authorities consciously and systematically recruited aboriginal migrant labourers who they envisioned as suitable—because they were regarded as both ‘able-bodied’ and ‘docile’, qualities which accompanied the Ranchis’ migration to the Andamans, tooFootnote ⁵¹—to work in forest clearance and infrastructure projects.Footnote ⁵²

After Independence, the post-colonial Indian state faced the task of including formerly excluded ‘savages’ into the nation.Footnote ⁵³ This shift from colonial savagery to post-colonial aboriginality was tackled by propagating the idea of national unity, in which tribals are allocated a positionality as ‘primordial Indians’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Subsequently, pastoral state policies were introduced to uplift STs through affirmative action. While the state does not admit a categorization of its tribal groups as indigenous by bringing forward the argument that all Indians are indigenous,Footnote ⁵⁵ and that it would be difficult to assess who came first,Footnote ⁵⁶ the Supreme Court of India validated the indigeneity of all Indian tribes in 2011.Footnote ⁵⁷

Affirmative action in India has been accompanied by the politics of indigenous (self-) empowerment, centring on self-definitions as Adivasi. Aiming to forge a new sense of identity among different tribal communities in order to resist the colonial rule of dikus (foreigners), politicized notions of Adivasi identity had already emerged in Jharkhand in the 1930s, among others, due to the institutional impetus of various Christian churches.Footnote ⁵⁸ In recent decades, Adivasiness came to be influenced by globally circulating notions of indigenous belonging and voice.Footnote ⁵⁹ Currently, many of the approximately 104 million Adivasis in IndiaFootnote ⁶⁰ are claiming their place with increasing rigour and self-confidence, especially when it comes to defending their access to land, as well as to other symbolic and material resources.Footnote ⁶¹ Struggles for land have turned into a central issue in Adivasi assertions of identity against dominant groups.Footnote ⁶² Conscious of the need to project themselves as citizens of India, Adivasis often refer to the twin banners of custom and indigeneity when representing their communities.Footnote ⁶³ As the term Adivasi has gained public visibility and a certain political legitimacy, it has been adopted as an analytical tool by academics, too.Footnote ⁶⁴

Like in many fields of contemporary politics in India, communalism has affected the discourse on the idea of indigeneity, too: Hindu nationalists oppose the category of the Adivasi. Instead, they propagate the term ‘Vanvasi’, which is invoked to identify the early residents (vasi) of the forest (van) as supposedly early Hindus that once upon a mythic time retreated to the ‘jungle’ and therefore lost contact with mainstream Hinduism.Footnote ⁶⁵ This struggle over a nomenclature must be viewed as part of a larger ideological project seeking to deny Adivasis a status as original dwellers of the Indian subcontinent, as this runs counter to the Hindu nationalist claim that the Aryans, who brought Vedic civilization to India, are the original inhabitants.Footnote ⁶⁶

Multiple indigeneities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

For the sake of exploring historical genealogies of indigeneity and their political efficacy in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, one can employ three broad categorizations of Indigenous Peoples. First, the indigenous inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands have been affected in different ways by colonialism.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Nicobars are currently inhabited by around 30,000 Nicobarese, who have traditionally sustained themselves by practising horticulture, fishing, hunting, and gathering; nowadays, many work for the government or in related white- or blue-collar professions, often accessed via the system of ST quota reservation. Employment opportunities have exposed many Nicobarese to the world outside their islands. After being severely affected by the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, which caused thousands of casualties and a ‘tsunami of aid’ in the period afterwards, many Nicobarese have adopted ‘modern’ economic practices, such as the use of money and consumption, which complement their indigenous practice of sustenance.Footnote ⁶⁸

The second category comprises the indigenous hunter-gatherers of the Andamans.Footnote ⁶⁹ A penal colony erected by the British in 1858 after the Mutiny/Rebellion lasted until 1942, when Japanese forces occupied the islands until the end of the Second World War. The establishing and maintenance of this settler-colony required the ideological creation of a sharp boundary to the other, ‘savage’ side of the frontier, embodied by the Andaman Islanders.Footnote ⁷⁰ The transportation of convicts to clear the tropical forests for the expanding colony implied destroying the indigenous islanders’ source of subsistence. These gathering and hunting communities resisted violently, but eventually lost out and were subjected to policies of cultural domination, co-optation, and assimilation.Footnote ⁷¹ As a consequence of contact, the indigenous islanders, especially the Great Andamanese and the Onge, were infected with venereal diseases and epidemics such as measles and influenza, which caused their widespread demographic decimation as well as a gradual, but continual ethnocide.Footnote ⁷² The spatial colonization of the islands must therefore be regarded as closely intertwined with the history of the gradual onslaught on its indigenous population. Here, the ideological justification for the very existence of a migrant and settler society was based on the settler-colonial negation of indigenous rights to land and self-determination.

Since 1947, colonial categories and knowledge production about the indigenous islanders have exerted considerable influence on the work of anthropologists, administrators, and activists, and continue to shape government policies. Until the turn of the millennium, the establishing of settlements and infrastructure as well as logging for the timber industry have caused constant extensions of the frontier into the tropical forests and, hence, extended conflicts with the indigenous hunter-gatherers.Footnote ⁷³

Ranchis fall under the third category: indigenous migrants. The term encompasses members of a large array of tribal groups such as Oraon, Munda, Kharia, and smaller numbers of Gond, Nagbansi, Lohra, Chik Baraik, Kawar, Turi, Rautia, Maheli, Gusai, Kumhar, Bhumia, Bokta, and some others.Footnote ⁷⁴ The local descendants of migrant labourers merged into a larger unit of identification known as the Ranchi community, conversing in their respective tribal languages, in Sadri—also known as Nagpuri, a lingua franca spoken in Chotanagpur—and in the local lingua franca, Andaman Hindustani.

The Ranchis’ subaltern history needs to be regarded as closely intertwined with the Andamans’ colonization. Since the first batch of Ranchi labourers was transported to the islands in 1918, aboriginalityFootnote ⁷⁵ has turned into their first and foremost mode of ascribed collective identification.Footnote ⁷⁶ Based on the colonial typecasting of Chotanagpuri Adivasis as ‘docile, submissive and hard-working coolies’, the post-Independence administration followed the earlier practice of relying on Ranchi labour;Footnote ⁷⁷ they continued to view these aboriginals as racially fit to accomplish the colonization of indigenous lands by clearing the tropical forests.Footnote ⁷⁸ As aboriginals, they came to assist the state in a specific settler-colonial transformation: through forest clearance, the ‘jungle’—which was inhabited by the Andamanese and thus marked as a space of savagery and wilderness—underwent an, at least symbolic, transformation into a civilized, ordered, and disciplined zone of settlement.Footnote ⁷⁹

Ranchi labour was thus instrumental in providing patches of forest land for the settlement of partition refugees from East Bengal, Burmese and Sri Lankan repatriates, and landless people from all over the subcontinent.Footnote ⁸⁰ Further, the thriving timber export industry once again demanded the provision of Ranchis as forest labour. Racialized ascriptions continue to inform both contemporary perceptions and representations of the Ranchis: settler communities still speak of Ranchis derogatorily as gudna (knee)—indicating a lack of intelligence and a proclivity to be hard-working and docile. Reflecting hegemonic discourse through strategic self-essentializations, many of my Ranchi interlocutors, in turn, also identify themselves with the same stereotype as hard-toiling and honest aboriginals.Footnote ⁸¹

In line with their material and discursive exploitation, employers such as the Forest Department and various timber contractors, repeatedly abandoned Ranchi labourers when they shifted places of extraction or when their contracts had terminated. Many labourers, however, did not return to their homelands, but stayed, often in the same spaces they had previously cleared of vegetation.Footnote ⁸² Representative of the voices of former labourers, one Ranchi interlocutor expressed a sense of collective ownership for these cleared plots: ‘Where else should we have gone, since we had already lived in these forests for so many years?’Footnote ⁸³

Due to their contribution to developing the island infrastructure through territorial expansion into indigenous lands, the Ranchis could be viewed as the ‘invisible architects’ of modern Andaman who have not been acknowledged by the authorities.Footnote ⁸⁴ L. P. Vidyarthi, an anthropologist who consulted the local administration in the 1970s, suggested providing Ranchi encroachers with land as a reward for their services.Footnote ⁸⁵ This suggestion may have been influenced by the fact that most of the tribal communities that fall within the category of Ranchis were classified as STs in their regions of origin. However, in 1984, this attempt to lend symbolic support to the Ranchis was turned on its head, when the Andaman administration, while demarcating reserved and protected forests, declared all non-indigenous residents on forest land as squatters.Footnote ⁸⁶ Further, in 2002, a ground-breaking Supreme Court Order identified villages on forest land as illegal encroachments that needed to be removed in order to restore and conserve the unique biodiversity of the Andaman forests.Footnote ⁸⁷ Since then, most Ranchi encroachers have been living with the constant psychological threat of a possible forceful eviction from their villages. Although evictions have happened several times, there has never been a full-scale eviction drive as this would render a huge population of the Andamans homeless and create social havoc.

During my fieldwork, I clearly observed the rampant socio-economic consequences of the Ranchis’ permanent subalternization. The reach of state welfare in illegalized encroachments has been very limited ever since: Ranchi villages are characterized by badly functioning schools and the absence of electricity, metalled roads, canalization, and water supply. Additionally, when hunting and gathering or extracting building materials from the forests, villagers are regularly criminalized by wildlife laws and charged by forest officials; interlocutors have complaint that they are routinely discriminated against by bureaucrats in official matters, for example, when documents, registrations, or other official bureaucratic business need to be accomplished. Further, Ranchis are commonly rejected when applying for jobs, either due to open racism (being called ‘dumb’ or ‘primitive’) or due to their lack of funds to pay the relevant bribes or social capital to receive ‘personal favours’ from individual bureaucrats. Exempting a small elite of Ranchis, who have reached a middle-class status through private employment or service against great odds, the majority of approximately 50,000 to 80,000 Ranchis has remained external to the avenues of social mobility provided by the state-directed local economy.

Local politics of indigeneity

As this article concentrates on analysing the difficulties Ranchi actors face when claiming ST status in the Andamans, one may assess the efficacy of these demands within the islands’ political landscape; here, different claims to an indigenous status by several communities coexist and, to a certain extent, compete with each other. Due to their visibility in the global public sphere, indigenous Andaman Islanders are at the centre of media attention and government intervention. This becomes evident when looking at recent media reports concentrating on how the Covid-19 pandemic may affect the ‘vulnerable’ tribes of the ‘isolated Andaman Islands’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Another example that garnered worldwide attention was the assassination of the American John Chau by the Sentinel in 2018.Footnote ⁸⁹ The event may be interpreted as a demonstration of indigenous sovereignty against the missionizing intentions of Chau. As the Andaman Islanders are counted among the few remaining communities of foragers in South and Southeast Asia, they seem to epitomize both evolutionary backwardness and ecological salvation. Consequently, they are frequently constructed as ‘ecologically noble savages’ by actors who are critical of capitalism and the anthropogenic destruction of Planet Earth.Footnote ⁹⁰ Their changing public representation—from ‘primitive junglees’ (jungle-dwellers) to ecological and socio-cultural ‘others’—in the era of the Anthropocene may be attributed to a shift in administrative terminology, too: as hunter-gatherers, the Andamanese were earlier classified as ‘Most Primitive Tribal Groups’ (MPTG); recently they have been renamed as ‘Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups’ (PVTG).Footnote ⁹¹

The devotion to protecting the PVTGs by both NGOs and the state has contributed to a burying of the Ranchis’ voices. For many years, Ranchi leaders have demanded affirmative action in higher education and government service under the guise of ST reservation. Further, recognition as STs indirectly also implies the recognition of encroachers’ rights to the forest under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 (Forest Rights Act or FRA), which would guarantee them claims of tenure, occupancy, and forest management, as well as provisions for local self-governance.Footnote ⁹² However, with the discrimination they face, the few political spokespersons of the community encounter major difficulties in speaking up for their community and articulating a voice in the language of indigeneity. Hence, the possibilities of recognizing the Ranchis as indigenous are broadly determined by their emplacement as aboriginal migrants in the larger multi-ethnic island society.

The Ranchis’ tribal positionality can be understood when looking at an example of public representation. On the occasion of the jubilee of the regional office of the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) at Port Blair in 2013, a local newspaper reported that a ‘colourful tribal folk cultural programme was presented at the ASI auditorium reflecting the multifaceted culture of different tribal groups of these islands including Nicobarese and Ranchi communities’.Footnote ⁹³ Such a performance of ‘tribal aesthetics’ demonstrates that a particular meaning is assigned to the Ranchis in their relation to the state: they are, similar to the Nicobarese, represented as ‘ex-savages’ on their way to modernization; by displaying their ‘tribalness’ for an audience considered as civilized, they function to assure the majority of their own ‘evolution’ to a higher level of human development; the ‘gaze back’ at indigenous peoples, who provide a ‘window into humanity's past’ through a ritualized display of ‘primitive tradition’, proves the capacity of the nation to draw those at the periphery into the mainstream. In contrast to ‘free savages’, that is, hunter-gatherers like the Jarawa or the Sentinelese, dancing Ranchis signify a reflexive consciousness of their tribal legacy, which, in other contexts, may be interpreted as an expression of their indigenousness; in fact, several states of the Indian union have recognized most ethnic groups covered under the label Ranchi as STs, even if they had migrated to another state, such as West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand, but not Assam, where Chotanagpuri Adivasis face similar challenges to their claim of an ST status.Footnote ⁹⁴

Such representations of Ranchis as ‘disciplined tribals’ are, of course, an indirect official recognition of their very indigeneity. In spite of their common cultural and socio-economic identification as tribals, the government and certain parts of the local civil society, especially politicians and indigenous rights activists, oppose the Ranchis’ demand to be included in the ST list. They are concerned that if somewhat more ‘developed’ Chotanagpuri Adivasis were granted recognition as STs, they would compete with the indigenous STs; as the latter had largely been alienated from their lands by colonization, the government changed its agenda towards the remaining communities from assimilation policies towards protecting these ‘dying savages’.

While the Andaman Islanders hardly utilize their quota of reserved seats and posts, the Nicobarese regularly avail themselves of ST reservations for government jobs or institutions of higher education. The Nicobarese form a powerful vote bank of the Indian National Congress (INC) and exert pressure on party politicians not to support the Ranchis’ claim. The argument goes that the Ranchis were migrants and not ‘sons of the soil’; as a result, they could not avail themselves of the same status as indigenous islanders. This case demonstrates the particular local trajectory that notions of indigeneity have so far taken in the islands: entangled in historical processes of settler-colonialism on indigenous lands, the discursive nexus Indigenous Peoples/Indigenous lands crucially informs both administrative and activist practices as well as political argumentation.

Overcoming a century of settler-colonial deprivation?

The recent centenary of Ranchi migration to the Andamans (1918–2018) deserves particular mention as it marks a history of oppression that has gone largely unacknowledged.Footnote ⁹⁵ A history that is characterized by its lack of inscription into public memory vividly demonstrates the workings of subalterns’ exclusion from material and symbolic resources through the silencing of their voices. While the shape of oppression has admittedly transformed since 1918, I have so far highlighted the ways in which ideologies of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and domination have continued to shape everyday forms of discrimination and disenfranchisement. Having elaborated on the external hindrances to a recognition of the Ranchis as indigenous migrants, I will now concentrate on how different notions of indigeneity as political identity, namely of Adivasis and Vanvasis, intersect with internal religious, political, and socio-economic fragmentations of the community. These divisions have considerably weakened the Ranchis’ political unity as a community and, hence, their bargaining position towards the state.

The first aspect of internal division concerns the localized replication of communal conflict that is characteristic, albeit in more drastic and violent ways, of certain sections of the Indian mainland: the Ranchis are divided into sections of Christians, Hindus, and Sarna worshippers,Footnote ⁹⁶ which are linked to competing systems of religious patronage. The Catholic majority of the Ranchis, for example, has strong affiliations with the Catholic Church as a global player that provides employment, funds for schools, hospitals, and so on; correspondingly, the fewer numbers of Ranchi Protestant sects are patronized by their respective global networks. Resembling its role in Jharkhand, the Church articulates a voice for all subaltern Ranchis by referring to the notion of the Adivasi. Many of my Christian interlocutors tended to equate Christian culture with Ranchi culture.Footnote ⁹⁷

In turn, some Hindu and Sarna worshippers in the Andamans subscribe to an identification as Vanvasi, which may be understood as an attempt by Hindutva politics to co-opt ST communities through a network of indoctrination and patronage. Correspondingly, certain sections of Hindu Ranchis have received patronage from the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, an all-India Hindutva organization that culturally indoctrinates STs into the belief that they are ‘primordial Hindus’. Having increased its activity on the Andamans in the last two decades, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram spreads right-wing ideology and Hindu nationalism through a network of educational and healthcare facilities. Interlocutors of the Ashram in several villages emphasized that they worked to effectively curb the large number of conversions, which they ascribed to the economic and political power of globalized Christianity. In the Andamans, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram provides a combination of religious instruction and socio-economic patronage through a number of hostels for Adivasi children, in which they are taught about their supposedly forgotten Hindu identity. Apart from that, the Ashram celebrates Hindu festivals and arranges and conducts marriages and other rituals, which are streamlined by the Ashram towards incorporating Hindu custom. Hinduization has changed, among others, the ways in which some Hindu Ranchis conduct rituals, venerate goddesses, and apply rules of ritual purity and pollution.Footnote ⁹⁸

These emerging politics of communal identification caused the Ranchis to perceive a deep internal divide on the basis of religious belonging. Among others, both the Catholic Church and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram came to sanction the reconstruction of a variety of traditional rituals such as the Karam festival, which ensures the protection of crops and the fertility of girls, which had not been celebrated earlier by the island diaspora.Footnote ⁹⁹ Communal division thus complicates the Ranchis’ possibilities of speaking in a strategically essentialized, united voice as a migrated or diasporic community-in-the-making—uniting under the label of indigeneity or, in this case, Adivasiness, when it comes to demanding political recognition and welfare from the state.

Apart from religious institutions, there are a few other civil society players, who have so far tried to take over the difficult task of articulating a voice for such a heterogeneous migrant group as the Ranchis. Few politically articulate Ranchis, who may be counted as middle-class citizens—many of them youngsters who have completed their higher education in Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, where they were politicized to fight for Adivasi rights—have attempted to organize this numerically second-largest community in the islands as a ‘vote bank’ to put forward political demands. A limited number of my interlocutors had joined the local section of the INC, which had been the major political player in the islands until the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) garnered political success in the early twenty-first century. However, I encountered several cases where Ranchis had either left the INC or were seriously at odds with the treatment they had encountered. One interlocutor narrated how he was openly discriminated against as a primitive tribal by other members of the party, who would also block his rise in the internal party hierarchy. Another Ranchi leader had earlier left the INC and started a local chapter of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), but soon abandoned the attempt without gaining political mileage.

In 2016, I interviewed a Ranchi leader from the younger generation, who, at the time, studied law, after having acquired several other degrees. This emerging leader had, along with some others, established the so-called Jan Kranti Party (People's Freedom Party, JKP), a regional political party in order ‘to fight for the rights of the Ranchi people’, as he said. According to the vision of its leader, the party hoped to establish itself as an alternative to the mainstream political parties, the INC and the BJP, before the elections in 2019. However, due to the intricate workings of patronage-based politics as well as the lack of funding and informal political connections established by their leaders, the Ranchi vote bank did not stand united and hence failed to make headway during the last election. Broad support for the JKP was unlikely, because Christian Ranchis traditionally support the INC, while Hindus tend to support the BJP.

Another important player in the political field is the Ranchi Association. Similar to numerous other community organizations maintained by diasporic groups like the Bengalis, Tamils, Telugus, Malayalis, Local-Born, Moplah, and so on, this civil society organization functions to reconstruct and maintain a diasporic identity. Beyond that, the Ranchi Association articulates a political voice for the Ranchi community and demands rights and entitlements from the state. Through the association, Ranchi leaders bargain with various leaders of political parties, seeking to gain their support, for example, for their claim to ST reservations. Professing to exert strong influence over the fragmented Ranchi vote bank, they promise electoral support for politicians in exchange for their support of the association and the community's agenda. This dynamic causes, almost ritually before upcoming elections, politicians to promise certain collective benefits to the Ranchi electorate in order to mobilize them. However, numerous Ranchi interlocutors have expressed serious frustration about the hollowness of these promises; in their perception, they were lied to and used but never really supported by either politicians or bureaucrats.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

As I have elaborated elsewhere on the Ranchis’ anarchic attitude towards external domination and state power, I will just briefly summarize the main features relevant to this article.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Ranchis’ institutionalization of partial self-rule through sustenance and state evasion in the margins of the state may be interpreted as an indigenous striving for subaltern anarchy.Footnote ¹⁰² It may be regarded as a complementary feature of the Ranchis’ worldview, which entails anarchic values of sharing, equality, and solidarity,Footnote ¹⁰³ expressed in egalitarian and reciprocal values, and practised in the form of consensual decision-making and mutual aid. While the state is never entirely absent from the world of the Adivasi,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ indigenousness implies an antagonistic positioning against the state and capitalist exploitation. My interlocutors’ frequent expressions of deeply ingrained aversion to the state and its institutions in many ways resembled the situation of the Munda in Shah's work on Jharkhand, which viewed the state ‘as a recent and outside invention’ by non-Adivasis that threatens their society.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Ranchis do, however, strategically engage with the state when it serves the purpose. Beyond that, one can observe frustration about their continued discrimination and lack of social mobility due to the absence of effective political leadership. Another reason why Ranchi leaders’ voices are rarely listened to in the hegemonic framework of the state may be partly caused by the fact that many Ranchis do not support their leaders because they do not believe in their ability and power to bring about change. Further, characteristic of their anarchic values, most of my interlocutors were suspicious of any form of political leadership that is not based on the face-to-face practice of direct democracy at the village or community level.

In spite of the Ranchis’ widespread alienation from the state system, one must take into account instances in which subaltern politics become manifest, such as in occasional public demonstrations of street power in the form of protests or strikes.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For example, every year Ranchi activists organize a march to remember Birsa Munda's ulugan (revolt);Footnote ¹⁰⁷ further, in August 2010, Ranchi leaders mobilized around 5,000 demonstrators to demand their inclusion in the state list of STs.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The chief coordinator of the organizing Adivasi Coordination Committee, Agapit Kujur, spoke to a local newspaper about the protest's agenda:

The language Kujur used was, of course, conscious of and sensitive towards the politically loaded fears of the Nicobarese that the Ranchis would compete with them for ST seats and overpower them. ‘Not usurping anyone's rights’ and only demanding ‘what goes unutilized by the local tribe’ implies that Ranchi leaders were actively searching to appease different political players in order to achieve their goals. For a short period after this protest, Ranchi political demands were prominent in media reports from the Andamans—in the long run, however, it did not significantly increase the Ranchis’ visibility in public discourse. On the contrary, the insistence of some Ranchi leaders on qualifying for ST reservations backfired a couple of years later: in the aftermath of the protest, they had refused an official offer to be included in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) list. The leaders had argued that they could not receive affirmative action as OBCs; as ‘true Adivasis’, they were entitled to ST status, which for them was the only viable option. In retrospect, these leaders have faced serious criticism from their own community because their demand for ST reservations has not moved forward for several years. The critics argued that the community could, in the meanwhile, have availed itself of some kind of reservation, which would, at least, have benefitted a few qualified Ranchi youngsters.

I encountered the problem of raising an effective voice again during another spell of fieldwork in November 2016. Seeking to symbolically fight the injustice of 100 years of official neglect, some local Adivasi activists and leaders told me that they planned to highlight the centenary of Chotanagpuri migration. They were planning a chakka jam—a roadblock causing a ‘total vehicle jam’ that aims to bring all traffic in the islands to a standstill. One of them reasoned that they hoped to mobilize 80,000 Ranchis living in 150 villages across the islands in order to accomplish an ST status; or, as a compromise and compensatory move in case their recognition as STs was denied, quota reservations of government jobs for their community. However, the big gathering in Port Blair to commemorate the centenary, which had been planned on 30 December 2018, had to be cancelled because the prime minister, Narendra Modi, arrived at Port Blair on that day.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This outcome reminds the observer of the workings of hegemonic logics and priorities within the state machinery, which crucially influence the Ranchis’ capability to raise claims to their share of the ‘reservation cake’. Nonetheless, as the system of popular welfare is designed to govern and administer people according to their particular demands of cultural identification and entitlement to differential treatment on grounds of vulnerability, backwardness, or historical injustice, it appears reasonable to strategically embark upon a re-examination of the hegemonic language of indigeneity provided by the system itself.

Travelling indigenous knowledge

The Ranchis are trapped between their aboriginality, which defines an exploitative division of labour, and their non-recognition as local indigenes—as indigenous people from, but not of the Andamans. This conundrum may be explained by the fact that the notion of indigeneity is closely tied to indigenous cultural traditions and peoples’ defence of their ancestral lands. Would it, instead, be possible to apply our understanding of indigeneity to contemporary insights about deterritorialization,Footnote ¹¹¹ which are influenced by post-modern disruptions of the fixed entity of culture and place? In the following, I would like to think through the ethnographic example of the Ranchis’ relations to the Andamans’ environment and ontologies in order to move towards a more flexible, contemporary notion of indigeneity that considers various forms of indigenous movement. At the heart of this example, I aim to show that values, norms, and practices associated with an ‘indigenous worldview’Footnote ¹¹² can travel along with indigenous peoples to other places, where they can become manifest in a diasporic setting or situation.

After several decades in the Andamans, the meaning of the term ‘Ranchi’ has undergone significant transformation. Previously, it had denoted a subaltern labour force, consisting of various Adivasi communities that were recruited in Ranchi; now, the term describes an ethnicity-in-the-making based on the transcending of ethnic division through inter-group marriage and shared living conditions when it comes to relations to the environment and cosmology, socio-economic, cultural, and political factors.Footnote ¹¹³ All these factors have come to create a strong sense of local belonging; from a geographical and ecological perspective, this sense of belonging may be understood when looking at characteristic place-making processes that emerged in multiple Ranchi villages situated on cleared forest spaces from the 1950s: reminded of the hilly landscape in Chotanagpur, the inhabitants often built their houses and gardens on elevations, while flat areas were reserved for fields and pastures.Footnote ¹¹⁴ One can tentatively assume that gardens, houses, fields, fences, objects, places of communal worship and ritual, but also immaterial social and religious institutions were reconstructed according to collective ideas about social aestheticsFootnote ¹¹⁵ and culturally learned modus operandi that were applied in the diasporic situation.

Place-making involves processes of knowledge transmission, too. Knowledge is never purely indigenous, but always borrowed, copied, shared, or stolen, and, at the same time, local and global, as both forms intersect with each other. Indigenous knowledge is thus context bound and relational, and dependent on different qualities of knowledge circulation.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Hence, my interlocutors’ relations to the forest and marine environment can be attributed to localizations and adaptations of indigenous knowledge, worldviews, and a set of associated values, norms, and practices which, I claim, migrated with them from Chotanagpur and were transferred to diasporic locations in the Andamans. Departing from this observation, the following passages support the demand that the idea of indigeneity needs to be disentangled from its narrowly defined definition according to which ‘ancient peoples inhabit a territory since times immemorial’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Instead, I argue that there should be more emphasis on viewing indigeneity as a cultural and ontological mode of existence that shows itself in the quality of peoples’ relationship to the environment they inhabit—be it since ‘times immemorial’ or only for a few generations.

Oral histories I conducted among elder Ranchi interlocutors about how they remembered the first years after their arrival in the islands, confirm the transmission of indigenous knowledge and the quality of relationships developed with their surroundings. Coming from Chotanagpur, where local communities engage with their environments in multiple ways—for example, forests and villages are ontologically part of one sphere, one being the life force for the other's existenceFootnote ¹¹⁸—many Ranchis told me that they quickly felt at home in the Andamans. Numerous former labourers opined that they had developed a good understanding of the island ecology during timber operations in the forests; here, they replicated subsistence and survival strategies from their homelands in Chotanagpur: for example, they survived largely without medical supplies or tools needed for survival in the harsh forest and marine environment—replete with venomous snakes, human-eating estuarine crocodiles, centipedes, and, especially, heavy monsoon rains. They sustained themselves by hunting, gathering, and fishing, as well as by horticulture, small-scale agriculture, and by holding livestock.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Common species the Ranchis hunt are wild boar, deer, pigeons, parakeets, ducks, cranes, herons, and bats. They also consume several species of saltwater fish such as mullet, jackerel, sardine, eel, and jackfish, as well as shellfish, molluscs, clams, slugs, and shells, which they forage at the seashore. Further, they catch freshwater prawns and fish from rivers and streams, and gather bamboo shoots, stems, and leaves, fern fronds, wild asparagus and different kinds of greens, wild flowers, forest fruits, and wild honey.Footnote ¹²⁰ A scarcity of consumer goods led them to improvise from available ecological features; for example, they built carrying sticks, haystacks, threshing machines, and canoes out of wood, and baskets and walls of huts with bamboo, and used palm leaves for mats and thatches.

It is safe to argue that the Ranchis productively applied their previous knowledge of the Chotanagpuri environment as well as their ontologies to the island ecology. It can be speculated that their detailed understanding of the qualities of local flora and fauna derived from intense observation of species,Footnote ¹²¹ their testing in a trial-and-error-system, and the creative utilization of such test results for various forms of sustenance. Observable among my interlocutors is that earlier generations of migrants have passed on their knowledge to subsequent generations. The Ranchis’ sound embeddedness in the islands is further complemented by their ontological worldviews, including spirits inhabiting the forest and the sea.Footnote ¹²² According to some interlocutors, most spirits were souls of ancestors who had travelled along with them from the mainland to the islands. Spirits can be either ‘good’ or ‘evil’; for example, they can be invited to assist in cultivation or be used by malevolent individuals for black magic, such as the ‘evil eye’. Spirits of people who committed suicide or who had experienced an unnatural death are viewed as potentially dangerous. Shiv Narain, an elder interlocutor who had been possessed twice by evil spirits, told me that these were usually souls who had been blown away by winds when travelling from one body into the next. Having found themselves lost between incarnations, they roam through the world or live in forests or graveyards, where humans are liable to become possessed by them.

My interlocutors’ connection to the spiritual world may be regarded as another element of their successful adaptation to the novel Andaman environment. It is complemented by ontological attitudes towards the environment, which is understood as a giving agent providing means of subsistence. This phenomenon can be observed both among classified gatherers-hunters as well as among nominal agricultural groups who hunt and gather.Footnote ¹²³ Such ontological worldviews and entangled relations with the environment may be categorized as ‘animist’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Ranchis’ spiritual embeddedness can be conceptualized as ‘Adi-dharam’ (the roots/beginnings of religious belief). This animistic religious system of Adivasis was identified by an Adivasi linguist, anthropologist, and political leader from Jharkhand, the late Ram Dayal Munda.Footnote ¹²⁵ Representative of a middle-class, revivalist stance, contributions like Munda's seek to embed Adivasi discourse within the global discourse of indigeneity, with the clear goal of instilling awareness and self-confidence among Adivasis through a reawakening of Adivasi culture.Footnote ¹²⁶

The Ranchis’ ethnomedicine deserves special mention, as it demonstrates another dimension of ecological and ontological relatedness to their diasporic homelands. A Forest Department ranger, herself from a Ranchi background, had conducted PhD research on the ethnobotany of her community. During an interview in 2011, she associated the Ranchis’ vast knowledge of medicinal plants to their close adaptation to the environment, causing them to experiment with locally available species.Footnote ¹²⁷ They found out, for example, how to treat wounds and cuts, centipede and snake bites, dysentery and asthma, cold and toothache; further, local plants are also used as bee and mosquito repellent or as an anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-viral remedy.Footnote ¹²⁸ More detailed knowledge of local herbs is, however, monopolized by vaids (vaidya: doctor, physician), non-professional ethno-medical practitioners, who specialize in the treatment of a few particular diseases and cases of spirit possession. Vaids are perceived to be gifted by the divine with special qualities to connect the visible and the invisible, or spirits and the world of plants, animals, and humans to each other. They usually do not disclose the herbal composition of remedies and ingredients of healing rituals.Footnote ¹²⁹

The observation that most Ranchis successfully fulfil the needs of both everyday food consumption and the practice of indigenous medicine on the basis of locally available species must be interpreted as a proof of their remarkable adjustment to the Andaman environment within a few generations—without having lived on primordial ancestral lands, but with an indigenous worldview. Being able to partly sustain themselves enables most Ranchis to maintain a certain independence from the outside forces of the market and the state, which may be interpreted as a striving for autonomy and autarky—an almost archetypical feature of Indigenous Peoples.

Conclusion: The Ranchis as indigenous subalterns

The dominance of discourses of ‘otherness’ and exoticism surrounding the Andamans and its indigenes crucially affected the Ranchis’ livelihoods and their political aspirations as subaltern and indigenous migrants.Footnote ¹³⁰ Notions of aboriginality, linked to larger processes of the commodification of ‘primitivism’ and ‘race’ in the colonial labour market, became instrumental for the functioning of the Andaman regime of migration and its local division of labour. The continued (ab)use of colonial stereotypes, characterizing Ranchis as docile and hard-working ‘primitive’ tribals became efficacious in the form of continued subalternization and marginalization. As a consequence, the Ranchis have not been able to establish an image of themselves that transcends racial and evolutionary backwardness; they have so far remained confined in the racial niche between ‘savages’ and the more ‘civilized’ world of larger Andaman society. While ‘primitivism’ has continued to mark them as ‘others’, the Ranchis have never been recognized as ‘primitive’ enough to become targets of ST reservation policies, which the state regards as the privilege of the now largely museumized indigenous islanders.

Despite various frustrations faced in interactions with the state, one must acknowledge that many Adivasis do strategically engage with the state in order to gain material, symbolic, and other benefits. Being threatened by eviction and due to the necessity of articulating a voice for the Ranchis in order to achieve social mobility, community leaders and, as a consequence, the majority of my subaltern interlocutors have endorsed the political language of Adivasiness. In spite of that, repeated attempts to organize the community as a vote bank in order express demands on the basis of an Adivasi identity, and to achieve the clear goal of reservation as migrated STs have so far proven unsuccessful. The Andaman polity works according to a localized politics of indigenousness; from a governing perspective, it is illogical to accept migrated Adivasis as STs due to the official commitment to protect the more vulnerable PTGs, who are viewed as the indigenous STs of the islands.

The Ranchis’ silence and invisibility in public discourse is largely a result of the fact that they do not speak up continuously and regularly as a united political force. One the one hand, there is an internal divide over welfare and patronage between Ranchi Christians and Hindus—under the influence of Hindutva ideology, the latter have increasingly resorted to declaring them as Vanvasis. Another major obstacle is the gap between voices trying to represent the community and the large majority who does not feel represented by politics at all. Speaking for and about the Ranchis is the privilege of non-subaltern members of the middle-class, whose voices are, somewhat reluctantly, tolerated in the discursive realm of civil society. These voices are taken over by the Ranchi Association, the Catholic Church, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, government servants of the community, and members of different political parties. The move to form a new regional Jan Kranti party for the Ranchis of Andaman and the failed preparations for a chakka jam in 2018 can also be read as the outcome of middle-class aspirations by a limited number of urban Ranchis trying to mobilize a subaltern majority under the banner of migrant indigeneity. This indirect, limited way of articulating voice can only construct subaltern Adivasis as dependent subjects of the state; it will hardly ever cause the Ranchis to be acknowledged as full citizens. Nonetheless, this strategy might efficaciously have an impact on both the field of electoral politics and the Ranchis’ collective modes of self-definition in future. The conundrum lies in the fact that the only viable political option is to retain multiple Adivasi life worlds for those living in the margins of the state. This may be realized through a continuous, vocal engagement with the state by using the complicated and exclusionary language of rights and entitlements as provided by the hegemonic discourse of indigeneity.

The larger effect of these politics could be witnessed during my time in the field: the rampant marginalization, discrimination, and disenfranchisement implied in mechanisms of state and electoral politics caused many Ranchi interlocutors to consciously evade the outside world and the public sphere. This retreat led them mostly into the ‘jungle’, and many interlocutors claimed to be satisfied with their decision to settle in peripheral forests of the Andamans, because ecological resources were much more abundant than in their Chotanagpuri homelands and hence better suited for their survival. As a result, a good number of Ranchis live a partly self-sustaining and self-governed life in the social and ecological margins based on the application of indigenous knowledge.

The Ranchis’ smooth adaptation to the Andaman environment also demonstrates the crucial role of indigenous and subaltern ethics, values, and practices in the making of the Andamans as their diasporic homeland—a place to survive and, finally, to live modestly, but well, and to stay.Footnote ¹³¹ The Ranchis’ approach towards the environment and the cosmic world of the Andamans should, therefore, be accepted as indigenous. As all Indigenous Peoples were, once upon a time, migrants, it makes sense to endorse a non-essentialist definition of indigeneity that is not tied to the ancestral land/culture nexus. Instead, this definition aims to concentrate on what indigenous actors do: their way of life, their human-environment relations, their kinship system, and, most importantly, their self-definitions as indigenous based on the common experience of historical and current disenfranchisement by states or majority populations.