Alpa Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India, Duke University Press, 2010, 288 pages, $23.95 paper, ISBN 9780822347651.

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Alpa Shah has written a brilliant ethnography of life in the small village of Tapu in northeast India, and the potential contribution of her book extends far beyond debates on indigenous life in the subcontinent. In the Shadows of the State is an excellent analysis that cuts across several themes: the operation of tribal political orders, the dangers of some strands of indigenous rights and environmental activism, and the transformations of state practices as they are reproduced through class hierarchies and sometimes violent networks. Through her excellent story-telling and clarity of analysis, Shah has succeeded in bringing a place, its people and their social and political relations to life. It is a pleasure to read, and an example of the possibility of skillful and expressive writing immersed in the texture of everyday life to enhance academic analysis.

Tapu is a small village in the state of Jharkhand. Shah’s analysis focuses on but is not limited to the 40% of the village who make-up the Mundas, an adivasi (or Scheduled Tribe) tribal group that constitute the poorest people in the village. While the book is immersed in the lifeworlds of the Mundas, Shah is careful to situate the Mundas in the context of social and political relations with the Sadans – rural elites and former landlords that make up 20% of the village – and with both the state and the often violent leftist Naxalite group, the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC). One of the most compelling threads through the book is the increasingly entrenched and, for the Mundas, highly exploitative connections between rural elites, state officials and politicians, and the MCC, which often work together to siphon off resources from development contracts. But throughout the book Shah is refreshingly careful in her attempts, as much as is possible, not to funnel these complex sociopolitical and economic relations into her own pre-determined political program. Instead, as she writes early in the text, her aim with this research and book was an open-mindedness that gave “priority to a commitment to the labor of critical ethnography” (page 27).

Sadans often benefit directly (through jobs) or indirectly (through an illicit financial cut) from state and donor development projects in the area. Rather than see this in the immoral sense of ‘corruption’, Shah argues in Chapter 3 that these are practices that access the ‘informal economy of the state’, and which have their own moral economy even as they largely exclude the Mundas. For example, many development contracts are often not seen locally as useful or appropriate (e.g. a community hall or new road). So the cut that Sadans make from acting as project contractors – cuts made by using cheaper materials or exaggerating labour costs – are partly reinvested in more locally appropriate projects, such as temples. In addition, the role of contractor is passed around between the Sadans, although this is a process that can create resentment. These forms of organising informal resource capture have become locally established norms, so much so that some of these practices – such as percentage cuts to state block development officers – are so matter-of-fact that they are not commented upon. Sadans are able to maintain their historical patron-client relations with the Mundas by using their networks to capture development resources and employ Mundas in the projects. As Shah argues, this represents a particular form of what Partha Chatterjee (2004) influentially called ‘political society’, but one characterised by the use of class power by rural elites to appropriate development efforts.

The networked resource capture involving the local state and Sadans increasingly involve the MCC as a third party. As Shah shows in Chapter 6, the MCC acts as protection racket for particular people within the state and rural elite, and helps – if the price is right – particular individuals and networks to secure development contracts over others. At the same time as benefitting from the MCC, the state argues that the organisation is a terrorist group that enjoys wide supported by the rural poor. Arguing against this, Shah shows how the Mundas often live in fear and avoidance of the frequently violent MCC.

At the heart of the book is a careful argument against the often homogenising and reductive nature of indigenous rights-based and environmental activism. The practices and worldviews of rural adivasi groups are often ignored in accounts of contemporary India, and even studies of indigeneity in Jharkhand tend to be “too easily seduced by city-based Jharkhandi activists” (page 31). Shah argues convincingly that these activists, though well-meaning, often marginalise the lives of the rural poor by representing them in ways that are potentially dangerous to their lives and livelihoods.

For example, in Chapter 4 Shah argues that the tendency by environmental activists to see indigenous groups as ‘nature lovers’ and ‘nature worshipers’ is not only false, but harmful. It is a stereotype that ignores the diverse ways in which indigenous people interact with the environment. For instance, environmentalists campaign for greater forestry, ostensibly on behalf of the adivasis, and insist on the protection of wild elephants living in and around these growing forests. But this ignores the lives of poor adivasis in villages like Tapu, “who despair as by day they try to repair the damage wrought by the wild elephants...[and who] are not allowed to kill the elephants or cut down the forests which have brought the elephants there” (page 111). Elephants increasingly trample villagers to death and have damaged several homes and countless crops. And yet, while the Mundas of course depend on the forests for food, fuel, shelter, and yes for elements of spirit worship, many of them would like to see the forestry reduced. Deforestation would not be an offence to their sacred beliefs because for Mundas spirits can be moved on safely elsewhere – indeed, this is how Mundas have historically deforested areas for settlement.

Shah also takes issue with the claims of Jharkhandi indigenous rights activists that adivasis are rooted to the land, a position that gives rise to “policies and strategies aimed at keeping them incarcerated” (page 138). In Chapter 5, for instance, she argues that far from being tied to the land, migration has been a prominent historical feature of adivasi life. In Tapu, migration for seasonal work is common. While indigenous activists argue that this is simply the consequence of capitalist labour exploitation, Shah shows that there are important additional motivations, including migrants moving to get away from local family relations, to be with a new partner, or to have fun or explore a new place. The anti-migration campaigners, argues Shah, would lock the poorest in place in order to fulfill a predominantly urban middle-class conception of the right sort of indigenous person.

Indigenous rights activists also fail to appreciate, argues Shah, the nature of adivasi political order. While activists often claim that adivasis separate the sacred and the political, in practice the two are indivisible. In the ‘sacral polity’ of the Mundas, forms of governance simultaneously guard villages from spirits and settle disputes through discussion, negotiation, and consensus-building with village elders. Three roles, described in Chapter 2, are particularly important to this sacral polity: the pahan, the village authority; the paenbharra, the helper of the pahan; and the parha, an inter-village authority consisting of a number of villages. The sacral polity meets three times per year and is reselected every year when the roles are chosen through random selection by a blind-folded individual known as a ‘light shadow’. The sacral polity is seen by the Mundas to be superior to that of the postcolonial state, which is viewed with fear and mistrust, unsurprisingly given the history of state-driven land dispossession, taxation, debt, and police violence, all of which are historically linked to class and caste inequalities. But the activists that promote secular governance in adivasi areas risk both locating this polity within the very postcolonial state that has done such historical damage to the rural poor, and displacing the values of egalitarianism, consensus, and reciprocity built-in to the sacral polity.

However, I was left wanting to know more about how this sacral polity works. This was even more the case after reading the book’s epilogue, which positions this sacral polity as a possible inspiration for an alternative political order (an ‘arcadian space’, to use Shah’s term from Benjamin). We hear surprisingly little about the workings of the sacral polity, and I was left wondering if it had been a little romanticised. The case here would have been more convincing if Shah had provided more detail on how the sacral polity works through local power relations, or how influence and misuse is kept in check, or whether the influence of village elders is universally appreciated by the Mudas. Perhaps these questions are yardsticks of western secular democracy and not appropriate for the context being described, but it is the one significant part of the book’s arguments that would have benefitted more discussion. The structure of the book also jumps a little between two narratives – that of the state-rural elite-MCC nexus, and that of the pitfalls of certain strands of activism – and the connections here might have been more smoothly handled. But these small aspects aside, In the Shadows of the State is an excellent achievement. In its pages are important lessons for understandings of the state, rural life, alternative political orders, the dangers of certain forms of reductive activism, and the possibilities of careful long-term ethnographic labour. It is also, although this is not an argument of the book, a powerful reminder in a world increasingly described as ‘urban’ of the need to understand forms of life and politics that – while existing in relation to urbanism in different ways – are essentially rural in character. 

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Chatterjee P (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black.