Sanjukta Das Gupta

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• Ph D
• Professor (Associate) at Sapienza University of Rome

Today deemed a PVTG, or Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group of West Bengal, the Lodhas (also known as Shabar) were categorized as a “criminal tribe” under British colonial rule and as a Denotified Tribe in the 1950s. This epistemic violence perpetrated by the British has remained deeply embedded within the hegemonic knowledge system of post-Indepe...

The collection of essays presented in this volume thus provides a comprehensive analysis of diverse forms of marginality in India across time in its multiple avatars. Using different theoretical approaches when discussing particular aspects of marginalities, all the authors reflect on temporal aspects of their representation centring on questions o...

Since colonial times, marginality – political, economic, and cultural – has been imposed upon the different Adivasi communities of the region. This idea of marginality was borrowed and perpetuated by Indian nationalists, even as they sought to represent themselves as the spokesmen of Adivasi exploitation, as well as by the post-colonial state which...

This volume adopts an inter-disciplinary approach to rethink the multiple dimensions of marginality – political, societal, economic, cultural, legal, spatial – and explores their new representations in colonial and postcolonial India. Departing from extant analyses of experiences of marginalization in diverse social groups, it proposes to problemat...

James Uden, ed. 2022. Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. viii + 177 pp. Figures. £15.95 (paperback—ISBN: 9780674260566).

The idea of the village as a self-sufficient, unchanging ‘little republic’, popularised in British colonial revenue literature since the early 19th century, was widely shared by Indian nationalists for whom the village represented the real India. The fiscal integration of villages within the Raj and the resultant socio-economic dislocations had a d...

The advent of Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century brought about momentous changes in the lives of Adivasis in India. While missionary activities among the «tribal» people and their contribution in creating the category of «tribes» has been studied at length, much less has been written about the Adivasi perspective of missionary activit...

This paper aims to unravel the changing forms of violence encountered by the ‘tribal’ or Adivasi communities of eastern India from the nineteenth century till the present times. The very identification of particular communities as ‘tribes’ and the imposition of attributes of tribalism, such as primitivity, and childlike innocence, by British coloni...

Adivasis are the indigenous people of eastern and central India who were identified as “tribes” under British colonial rule and who today have a constitutional status as “Scheduled Tribese. The notion of tribe, despite its evolutionist character, has been internalized to a large extent by the indigenous people themselves and has had a considerable...

In the context of the changing nature of India’s relationship with her tribal or Adivasi population, this paper seeks to analyse the construction ‘tribes’ in colonial India and how these came to influence contemporary India’s understandings of the category. Arguing that state policies are actuated by myriad ways in which target populations are defi...

Scholars of colonial and post-colonial India have widely agreed that the earliest Indian manifestation of history as a rational-positivist discipline occurred in the nationalist historiography of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The British colonizers’ use of history as a tool of self-legitimation rested on the stereotypical assumption that...

‘De-centring dominant narratives in India: An Introduction’ in Rivista Degli Studi Orientali, Supplemento 2, Special Issue on De-Centring Dominant Narratives in India: Alternative Perceptions of History and Development (edited By Sanjukta Das Gupta And Amit Prakash), 2018, pp. 137-153.

Con oltre un miliardo e duecento milioni di abitanti e oltre ottocento milioni di elettori, l’India rappresenta la più grande democrazia del mondo. Nonostante i dubbi che molti osservatori, all’indomani dell’indipendenza nel 1947, avanzavano circa le possibilità di sopravvivenza della neonata repubblica, negli ultimi settant’anni la democrazia indi...

In Singhbhum, the most significant change associated with the colonial period was the expansion of settled cultivation in the late nineteenth century. This, in fact, constituted one of the ways in which the early colonial administration sought to consolidate its control over the adivasis of the region. Extension of cultivation served the dual purpo...

Festscrift in honour of Prof. B.B. Chaudhuri

Festschrist in honour of Prof B.B. Chaudhuri

This volume investigates how, where and when subjects and citizens come into being, assert themselves and exercise subjecthood or citizenship in the formation of modern India. It argues for the importance of understanding legal practice - how rights are performed in dispute and negotiation - from the parliament and courts to street corners and fiel...

In course of their colonial adventure in India, the British sought diverse ways to establish law and order as the main foundation of their rule, thereby transforming pre-existing power structures and political economies. Confronted with the 'exceptional' nature of particular regions, the men on the field devised and enacted special legislation and...

Tribal protest and resistance in colonial India has usually been depicted as rebellions, violent upsurges and 'savage attacks' against the state. However, since the late 19 th century 'tribal' communities had also taken recourse to legal battles in the law courts in order to establish their rights-which, in fact, has been far less discussed by scho...

This issue of Anglistica AION is dedicated to indigenous India and to some of its forms of emerging subjectivity. After having been studied by ethnoanthropologists as cultural exceptions or worse after having embodied the stereotype of the ‘born offender’ in colonial legislation, Indian tribals are claiming a new articulated visibility and an ampli...

This paper aims to highlight the multiple and sometimes contradictory strands in the British colonial discourse on nature and indigeneity in India. With reference to the private accounts of British civil and military officers working in Chotanagpur, it argues that their depictions of the landscape resided in a space between the ‘imagined’ and ‘real...

This article traces the trajectory of the changing lives of Adivasi women of eastern and central India, i.e., the erstwhile Chotanagpur Division and the Santal Parganas of the Bengal Presidency under colonial times, and which is today incorporated largely within the state of Jharkhand. In India today, Adivasi women figure among some of the most dep...

The unfamiliar landscape of India had evoked diverse reactions from British colonizers who saw it as a land of scenic beauty, practical opportunity, disease, and death. By contrast, others believed the country to be capable of environmental amelioration through adoption of measures that would make the land fit for European settlement. This they sou...

Adivasis have principally been studied in the context of rebellion, environmental history and the politics of identity. However, preoccupations with definitions and notions of identity, while important in themselves, tend to shift attention away from the inner lives of these communities. This book deals with different aspects of the histories of ad...

The relations between the tribal people and the Indian state today appear to be overtly confrontational. To the state tribal land acquisition is essential for its development agenda since the predominantly tribal regions are rich in natural and economic resources; to the tribals, land acquisition leads to displacement and threatens to deprive them...

The Kol [the Ho] is a very poor cultivator compared with the ryots of Orissa and other parts of Bengal. The fact is that he has never really outgrown the state of his prehistoric ancestors. He is a hunter who has been forced to agriculture by the contraction of the forest areas and a consequent decrease of game. The Kol's ideal cultivation is jhumi...

While recent research on adivasis under colonial rule tends to focus on issues of identity politics, categories and definitions, it is important to emphasise that the histories of adivasis were shaped by the constantly evolving British policy towards them, their own unique features, socio-cultural traditions, and the nature of their integration wit...

Introduction Nationalist historians for long have interpreted the impact of colonial policies on Indian agriculture in terms of stagnation. It has been argued that British revenue policies, which functioned as a 'built-in depressor', effectively resulted in the flight of capital from the countryside and precluded any form of improvement in agricult...

"This article discusses how changing access to nature impacted an adivasi people, the Hos of Singhbhum. Without romanticizing the pre-British past, it may be argued that for the Hos of the time there had been dependence both on the forest and on cultivation, which had ensured them a minimum livelihood. This paper explores how their access to nature...

Contents 1. Introduction Raj Sekhar Basu and Sanjukta Das Gupta 2. Dalit Consciousness and Movements in the United Provinces: Colonial legacies Sudha Pai 3. Communities on the Margins: Dalit Consciousness in Colonial South India Y. Chinna Rao 4. Casteism in Bengal: the Communal Award and the Poona Pact, 1932 Hasi Banerjee 5. The Intellige...

This paper makes a broad survey of cultural links between Japan and BIMSTEC countries over the ages. It has two major sections. The first deals with the rise of Buddhism in India and its spread to other countries of Southeast and East Asia, including Sri Lanka, Thailand and Japan, and also discusses the Buddhist heritage and its impact upon Japan i...