Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age

By Alice Tilche

As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development, indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to be overrepresented among the country’s poor. Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India, with a total population of more than 100 million people who speak more than three hundred different languages. Although their historical presence is acknowledged by the state and they are lauded as a part of India’s ethnic identity today, their poverty has been compounded by the suppression of their cultural heritage and lifestyle.

In Adivasi Art and Activism, Alice Tilche draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted in rural western India to chart changes in adivasi aesthetics, home life, attire, food, and ideas of religiosity that have emerged from negotiation with the homogenizing forces of Hinduization, development, and globalization in the twenty-first century. She documents curatorial projects located not only in museums and art institutions, but in the realms of the home, the body, and the landscape. Adivasi Art and Activism raises vital questions about preservation and curation of indigenous material and provides an astute critique of the aesthetics and politics of Hindu nationalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9780295749723

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Padma Kaimal

K. Sivaramakrishnan

Anand A. Yang

Series Editors

ADIVASI ART AND ACTIVISM

Curation in a Nationalist Age

ALICE TILCHE

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

Seattle

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Washington Press

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UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

uwapress.uw.edu

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Tilche, Alice, author.

Title: Adivasi art and activism : curation in a nationalist age / Alice Tilche.

Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2022] | Series: Global South Asia / Padma Kaimal, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Anand A. Yang, series editors. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021135 (print) | LCCN 2021021134 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295749709 (Hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780295749716 (Paperback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780295749723 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ethnological museums and collections—India—Gujarat. | Indigenous art—India—Gujarat—Conservation and restoration. | Indigenous peoples—Material culture—India—Gujarat—Exhibitions. | Indigenous peoples—India—Gujarat—Ethnic identity. | Social problems in art—Exhibitions. | Intercultural communication. | Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. | India—Gujarat—Economic conditions. | India—Gujarat—Social conditions. | India—Gujarat—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC GN36.I4 .T55 2022 (ebook) | LCC GN36.I4 (print) | DDC 306.0954/75—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021135

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1Tribal Art, Museums, and the Indian Nation

2Social Reform in Gujarat

3A Museum from the Tribal Point of View

4Broken Gods

5The Making of Tribal Art

6Curating the Home, the Body, and the Landscape

7Performing Adivasiness

Conclusion

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book has taken place over a decade. It is the result of several dedicated fieldtrips and more casual visits to Chhota Udaipur district, the western Indian tribal belt and the regional and national institutions dedicated to the study of adivasi arts and culture; and of ongoing collaborative efforts. I would like to thank all the people, communities, and institutions that I encountered in the course of this research without whose contributions this work would not have been possible. I am deeply indebted to those who shared parts of their lives with me, who extended their affection and friendship, and who gave me humbling life lessons that I will carry through. While the richness of these encounters informs the commitment with which I began writing, the final product has become something quite different that only captures fragments of these lives, and I apologise for the inevitable omissions.

The book has been generously supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust, as well as by smaller research grants at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the London School of Economics. In India, I would like to thank all staff at Bhasha Research and Publication Centre in Baroda and at Vaacha and the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh. I am especially thankful to Ganesh Devy for being an inspiring, patient, and informative interlocutor throughout; to Surekha Devy, Sonal Baxi, Vipul Kapadia, Nita Kapadia, Lokesh Khetan, Nikita Desai, Geoffrey Davis, Narain Rathava, Vikesh Rathava, Nita Rathava, Rekha Chaudhari, Vanita Chaudhari, Arjun Rathava, Sonal Rathava, Lila Rathava, Hari Rathava, Kocer Rathava, Jina Rathava, Manoj Chaudhari, Madan Meena, Dakxin Bajrange Chhara, and the Budhan Theatre team. I am thankful to Eileen and Brian Coates for all that they taught me and to Greg D’Alles for sharing some memorable times with me during fieldwork and generously contributing with his material. I am deeply indebted to Ashokbhai and the members of the Adivasi Ekta Parishad for the inspiration they provided throughout and for becoming guides and teachers.

The Dirubani Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar and the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi provided affiliation for this research. Ajay Dandekar, Shireen Ratnagar, Lancy Lobo, Amita Baviskar, Rajesh Mishra, Haku Shah, Jyotindra Jain, Achyut Yagnik, Father Xavier, Arun Vaghela, Kalyan Kumar Chakravarti, Vikas Bhatt, and all the staff at the Indira Gandhi Rasthrya Manhav Sangrahalaya contributed with insightful discussions to this research. In Baroda, I would like to thank Lily Goldschmidth, Maya Sharma, and Indira Pathak; Hittesh Rana, Joshnabhen, and Jyoti Bhatt; and Pyush Gupta for their support and extraordinary kindness. In Delhi, I would like to thank Subashri Krishnan, Jawaharlal Raja, Jaya Sharma, Lesley Esteves, Lawrence Liang, Trisha Gupta, Anuj Bhuwania and Shambhawi Vikram for her help with editing. Akshay Khanna introduced me with love, long ago, to people and places that have become my own, and I thank him for his support over the years as a partner, friend, and interlocutor.

I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues who read through versions of this book, offering detailed critical comments and crucial support. At SOAS, I am forever thankful to my PhD supervisor David Mosse—one of the rare masters I can say to have encountered—whose commitment to this project has been thorough and generous throughout; and to Edward Simpson, for the detailed and insightful comments over drafts of this work. Stephen Hughes, Trevor Marchand, Johan Pottier, Tom Selwyn, Lola Martinez, Antonia Kreamer, Paul Rollier, Gaia Hatzfeld, Brendan Donegan, and Giulia Battaglia supported the early phases of this project. Chris Fuller, Jonathan Parry, Deborah James, Laura Bear, Carrie Haitmayer, Insa Koch, Ana Paola Gutierez, Natalia Buitron-Airez, Max Bolt, Hans Stainmuller, Chloe Naum-Claudel at the London School of Economics, Giacomo Loperfido, and colleagues at the school of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, supported me in the later stages of this project; Alpa Shah, Daniel Rycroft, Emma Tarlo, the editors at Washington University Press, and the anonymous reviewers helped me think of the kind of book I wanted to write.

I am forever grateful to my parents, Silvia Antonini and Andrea Tilche, and to my sister, Arianna, and brother, Nicola, for their love, guidance, and unconditional support. I am thankful to George St. Clair for being my most supportive and harshest reader through the ups and downs of this journey; and to Leo and Clara for keeping me to time.

ABBREVIATIONS

ADIVASI ART AND ACTIVISM

INTRODUCTION

THE GURU’S RED VELVET THRONE WAS STILL EMPTY. HE HAD slept late on a January morning in 2017 after presiding over devotional gatherings in remote villages of Gujarat’s eastern forested and hilly tracts. Adivasi women and men who had devoted their lives to his service walked quietly around the temple grounds, sweeping the floors, cleaning rice for the midday meal, and tending after the cows. Paintings, photographs, and calendar art depicting the guru hung in every corner. They portrayed him in eccentric golden and pink clothes, sometimes playing the flute as the reincarnation of the Hindu god Krishna. It took the guru some time to dress for the day. He sat for a while in the open courtyard in front of a mirror, oiling and combing his thick, dyed-black hair. As in the images on the walls, he slipped into a gold and red silken outfit that matched his velvet throne. When he sat down, the devotees who had come to the temple for his blessings bent to his feet. His wife did the same and handed him a plateful of fruit and tapioca and a bowl of milk. This is all he eats, she told me with pride.

I asked the guru about the past and about the changes he had witnessed in adivasi societies over his years of service in the area. His answers were not new to me; I had heard them before in the words of the many reformers who over the years had endeavored to improve tribal life.

Rai Muni, as the guru was called, went on to explain how people’s material lives had radically changed for the better, linking such exterior change to an improvement of character and a new faith. Although he talked about them, he himself belonged to the Bareya adivasi community, also known in some areas of the region as Rathava. But he also represented the Purushottam Shastra, an offshoot of the Swaminarayan religion, a powerful, growing branch of Hinduism with international seats in the US, the UK, and East Africa. As he spoke of adivasis’ dog-like life, those who had gathered on the floor to receive his blessings nodded and laughed. They too were adivasis. I knew some of them. They still lived in mud houses, and their parents wore the same clothes, ate the same foods, and worshiped the same gods that the guru described with such disdain. Others had taken out expensive loans to build new cement houses in nearby small towns. They wore good clothes and had abandoned, at least publicly, the consumption of alcohol and meat that was once so central to adivasi rituals and a key supplement to their diet.

THE ARGUMENT

As the Indian government consolidates an aggressive model of development and a majoritarian politics of Hindu cultural nationalism, its indigenous people, also known as tribals or adivasis, continue to be overrepresented among the country’s poor. Their economic poverty, linked to lack of access to resources and environmental degradation, is compounded by social stigma and the suppression of their cultural heritage and lifestyle. The stigma goes so deep that among some communities, it has become common to see one’s own heritage with disgust, as a life of dogs.

With a focus on the western Indian state of Gujarat, this book examines two paths through which indigenous groups address their increasing disadvantage. First, it examines how they reevaluate their traditions as art, making museums, performances, and works that circulate in the global art market. Second, it shows how adivasis are simultaneously distancing themselves from and actively erasing their traditions in favor of new (Hindu) religious and indigenous identities. Through the lens of art and the shaping of everyday objects, looks, and landscapes, the book tells the story of how a model of social revivalism based on preservation has failed against the growth of religious movements.

Since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, indigenous art from India has reached the world market.² Tribal artists have emerged in the national and international art scenes, with their art decorating government buildings in New Delhi and restaurant walls and coffee shops from London to New York. Exhibitions such as Other Masters (Jain 1998) at the Quai Brainly in Paris, Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and more recently Another India in Cambridge, UK, are among the most high-profile examples of tribal art’s new reach (Eliot 2017). Rural and artoriented NGOs have also developed in different parts of the country alongside social movements and civil society activism. Adivasi groups have used visual art, music, and village theater as tools to fulfill their aspirations for mobility, to gain recognition, and to link their local struggles to international indigenous movements.

An example of such projects is Vaacha: Museum of Voice (in the Gujarati language, vaacha means voice, language, or expression), a tribal community museum set up by the charismatic scholar and social activist G. N. Devy to reevaluate adivasi knowledge as a resource for development and the future. According to Devy, different adivasi societies of India are experiencing a kind of aphasia, a medical term that he uses to indicate these communities’ amnesia and pathological loss of speech (Devy 2006). Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India who speak more than three hundred distinct languages. As subaltern communities and perceived obstacles to development and modernity, adivasis, through deprivation and dispossession of their natural resource base, have been routinely denied the means to reproduce their material existence (Devy 2009). They have also been denied the faculty of intellectual labor through lack of access to quality education and the overt suppression of their linguistic and cultural heritage. This genocidal destruction of difference, Devy argues, has left adivasis literally speechless, unable both to recognize their own language and knowledge system and to use them to express their knowledge. Vaacha was established to reverse this trend by providing a platform for adivasi expression. The museum developed as part of the broader educational experiment of the Adivasi Academy and was conceived as a project of reverse anthropology/museology in which adivasis would be curators of their own culture rather than objects of display. As a statement against centralization, the museum is located in the rural and tribal village of Tejgadh, in Chhota Udaipur district (Gujarat). At the same time, this project also depends on and mobilizes transnational networks of funding, art, research institutions, and indigenous groups. Vaacha, an institution with which I have collaborated since 2005, is central to the story of this book.

Globalization and economic liberalization in the 1990s have coincided with the resurgence in India of Hindu nationalism, which seeks to redefine the country as a culturally homogenous Hindu nation by erasing diversity through means that have included mass violence, vigilante mobs, and the destruction of sacred sites and by using art and new technologies of image making to promote Hindu religion as India’s culture. Hindu organizations, including powerful transnational religious sects, have made dramatic inroads in rural and adivasi areas of the subcontinent, especially in Gujarat. They have built schools, hospitals, and most notably grand temples and pilgrimage complexes in an effort to incorporate indigenous groups within the fold of Hinduism. Adivasis are increasingly joining these groups, transforming their everyday aesthetics, habits, and vocabularies of collective expression.

In 1996, the same year that Ganesh Devy set up the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh, the BJP (Bharatya Janata Party, or Indian People’s Party) was elected to power in Gujarat and has since remained the dominant political force in the region. In 2014 and again in 2019, the party won a landslide victory in national elections, which also brought Gujarat’s former chief minister Narendra Modi to the prime ministerial role. The BJP is part of a broader umbrella of organizations known as the Sangh Parivar (United Family), which also includes grassroots groups, cultural organizations, and loosely affiliated gurus and Hindu religious sects. These groups promote an ideology of cultural nationalism known as Hindutva, according to which Hindus are the original inhabitants of India (or Hindustan), a country that has for long been tortured and humiliated by foreign invaders and must be restored to its original foundations (Hansen 1999; Jaffrelot 2007). According to this ideology, there are no indigenous people in India; Hindus are India’s original inhabitants. Adivasis are vanvasi (people of the forest) or fallen Hindus, groups that were pushed to the forest by India’s many invaders and, having degenerated from a pristine condition, must be brought back to the light through programs of Hinduization. The book’s focus on Gujarat, therefore, is not incidental. Gujarat is the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi but also the place where his ideas have been most overhauled. It is also the birthplace of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister at the time of this writing, and the ground where the BJP has tested and consolidated its politics of Hindutva, which have now been exported to national cause.

When I first visited Chhota Udaipur district in 2005, socioreligious reform was under way. Rai Muni had built a modest temple in Tarapur village, and representatives of different religious and political groups had set up their own centers and paid regular visits to these remote areas. Rathava adivasis had begun distancing themselves from negative aspects of their identity, including alcohol consumption, meat eating, and ritual sacrifice. Some had joined new religious congregations, although the practices of the reformed and non-reformed continued to coexist. When I returned to the area ten years later, an aesthetic-cultural-political revolution had radically transformed the region. Hindu religious groups now dominated the social and physical landscape. Rai Muni had annexed a grand temple-cum-garden to his once more modest shrine. Powerful transnational congregations with millions of members, such as the BAPS Swaminarayan sect, had built imposing temple complexes in market towns of the district and in areas once considered remote.³ Among adivasis, reform had become widespread. People had adopted new dress styles, aesthetics, diets, and gods and had less tolerance toward the practice of the non-reformed. Belonging to a sect had become a necessity to avoid social stigma, bachelorhood, and social exclusion.

The project of preservation promoted by Vaacha and the one of erasure promoted by the guru were in principle opposed. The first took adivasi culture as a resource for the future; the second framed it in the past. However, projects of preservation and erasure also overlapped. The making of adivasi identity through art and religion was part of a similar engagement with modernity, one that involved the creation of new categories of social action (art and religion) and new material landscapes (the museum and the temple). The transformation and exhibition of everyday and ritual objects as art involved the codification of embodied habitus. As objects moved from the mundane realm of the home to a museum or art gallery, they had to be explained, displayed, authorized, and curated. In a similar way, the transformation of practices to the new space of the temple and to the category of religiosity also gave rise to new kinds of semiotic ideologies—that is, to new understandings of what signs are and how they function in the world. In short, both projects involved a new kind of separation from and relation with objects as markers of indigeneity and tradition on the one hand and of reform and purity on the other. Both projects were also about erasure. Although the museum was envisaged as a space for preservation, the processes of purification, selection, and innovation involved in the making of tribal art also responded to, and facilitated, socioreligious reform, as will become clear in the course of this book.

Until now, there have been no critical comprehensive studies of adivasi art or museums in India. The few works available on the subject are quite narrow in scope and focus on a particular artist, art form, or institution (Guzy, Hatoum, and Kamel 2009; Jain 1998). Studies of adivasi and more broadly indigenous and community art also tend to take a celebratory approach; art is empowering for it fosters pride and self-respect by giving visibility and value to a historically stigmatized way of life (Guzy, Hatoum, and Kamel 2009; Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine 1992; Peers and Brown 2003). These studies also tend to position the indigenous as an oppositional category to the nation and the given dominant culture. Indigeneity is about asserting a positive difference and distinction through art or other means.

In this book, I offer a counternarrative to the ideal that tribal art is empowering. I have never liked that word, perhaps because even the poorest adivasis I met did not see themselves as being formerly powerless. If we study art beyond the confines of art institutions, a different picture emerges. The transformation of life into art, it is true, has the potential to bring recognition to marginalized populations by challenging entrenched stereotypes and creating works that travel within national and international fields of consumption. Over the years, the Rathava adivasi artists and curators with whom I worked became experts of their own culture; they gained self-confidence and a new sense of pride. But art making was also differently oriented among adivasi groups. As a commodity, art was also doing the aesthetic work of the nation and could be appropriated to fulfill rather different political and aspirational projects that were not always progressive in the sense that other authors celebrate. Indigeneity was a project not only of opposition but of inclusion.

The analysis develops through the overlapping axes of art and religion. The study starts from the theoretical assumption and empirical finding that art and identity are not things that exist in the world ready to be discovered, appreciated, or erased. Instead, I focus on the material making of adivasi art and identity as categories: the processes of selection, evaluation, and translation that codify rituals and everyday objects, the cultivation of new semiotic ideologies and bodily dispositions, and the insiders/outsiders that authorize certain interpretations. Bringing insights from the anthropology of art to the study of religion and the mundane, I document different kinds of curatorial projects, not only in museums and art institutions but also in the realms of the home, the body, and the landscape. These include museums and museum-like structures, house-building projects, performances, and the cultivation of everyday tastes, habits, and looks.

My analysis draws on over ten years of work in rural and tribal areas of western India (especially in the Bhil/Rathava region of Gujarat) and with art institutions and social movements. While taking a sympathetic approach to projects of indigeneity and social revivalism through the making of traditional art, this book eventually chronicles their decline. Although preservation offered adivasis a more sustainable avenue to upward mobility based on the recuperation of one’s past rather than on its erasure, projects of reevaluation through art struggled to gain momentum and participation. In contrast, religious sects thrived, and the aesthetic played a key role in promoting socioreligious reform. Sects offered adivasis avenues to mobility through compelling aspirational projects of consumption and aesthetic transformation.

BEING AND NOT BEING ADIVASI

Tension between preservation and erasure is inbuilt in the very category of adivasi. It was key to debates over the administration of tribal areas during the colonial period and over the place of adivasi populations in independent India. A concern with the aesthetic—what adivasis wear and what they make—has also been recurrent as a marker of human and economic development and as a way to define the place of these populations within the nation.

India has one of the largest indigenous populations in the world. Scheduled Tribes (STs), a legal, constitutional category, make up around 8 percent of India’s total population (104 million people) and 15 percent of the population of Gujarat (nine million people).⁴ Alongside a list of depressed castes, STs hold special rights and qualify for affirmative-action policies, including reserved quotas in employment and education (Moodie 2015; Xaxa 1999, 2005). There are also certain areas of the country, like the tribal district of Chhota Udaipur where this book is largely set, in which special laws, such as the largely disregarded inalienability of land, should, in theory, apply. The term adivasi literally means first inhabitants and was popularized in the 1930s by Christian missionaries and as part of self-respect movements (Hardiman 1987; Shah 2010, 15). However, unlike the context of settler societies like Australia and North America, in India, claims of indigeneity have been difficult to sustain on historical grounds because of discontinuous layers of migrations (Béteille 1998; Shah 2010). Tribals are not recognized as indigenous people at the national level, although they are considered indigenous at the level of international law under the UN and the International Labor Organization (Baviskar 2007).⁵

The Bhils are the largest tribal group in Gujarat and in India at large, and around two hundred million people in the subcontinent speak Bhil languages. The Rathavas are a smaller group, sometime also described as a subgroup of the Bhils, who live mostly in Chhota Udaipur district. Rathavas are not isolated or egalitarian societies as indigenous people are often represented. They moved to Chhota Udaipur from neighboring regions and are therefore themselves settlers; as the material culture of the area testifies to, these groups have also historically lived in a close relation of antagonism and interdependence with other Hindu and Muslim communities (Bayly 1999, 25–64; Guha 1999). While some scholars rightly argue against employing terms like tribal or adivasi, to avoid reproducing the skewed assumptions and unequal histories that they embody (Singh 2015), these categories have also become social facts and cannot be easily dismissed (Baviskar 2007). Tribal is a denominative commonly used by Rathava groups in their interactions with the state and in making claims to resources. The term adivasi has become popular among the more educated and politicized sections of the community, with different connotations. While I privilege the term adivasi and local group names such as Bhil or Rathava, I also employ tribal and indigenous to reflect the contexts of their use and to provide an insight into the differences that these terms express.

One of the most far-reaching debates around the category of tribe, which has involved generations of administrators, politicians, and anthropologists, has revolved around the absolute or relative otherness of these populations, their indigeneity, and their relation to caste society, the other organizing principle through which India has been imagined. According to one view, tribes represent a distinct type of civilization essentially different from caste. The second view focuses instead on similarities, and tribes are seen as a kind of caste, part of the diversity of the Indian subcontinent. Some of the defining criteria for these distinctions have included social structure, geographical isolation, tribal languages, religion, economic backwardness, occupation, and indigeneity (Béteille 1998; Xaxa 1999, 2005).⁶ There has been strong disagreement, however, over which criteria should be privileged and to what extent tribes should be considered different from castes, given the extent of historical interconnections among groups (Bailey 1961; Dumont 1972; Xaxa 2001). Studying the dramatic changes that followed India’s independence, the anthropologist F. G. Bailey suggested the existence of a caste and tribe continuum and argued that ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ should be seen as opposite ends of a single line (Bailey 1961, 13).

In the period leading up to India’s independence, when tribal identity became a matter of concern in sustaining claims to national unity, the Indian anthropologist G. S. Ghurye famously argued that tribal groups should be considered backward Hindus because of their long-term contact with Hindu religion and society (1943). Ghurye built his case on the difficulties that census officials faced in the identification of tribal religions and in distinguishing between the religion of tribal communities and that of