Sacred land and the politics of voice

This article investigates the environmental struggles of the Dongaria Kondh tribals in Eastern India as an example of resistance to Baudrillard’s conception of the code by which modern industrial society speaks to and understands itself. Baudrillard explicates the code to be images or simulacra in the nature of floating signifiers into which meaning may be invested by capitalism’s drive to reproduce itself. Refusing to allow their land to be acquired by a mining corporation called Vedanta Resources, the tribals counterposed their understanding of land as sacred, to the symbolic meaning ascribed to it by capitalistic logic – a valuable Resource which needed to be exploited for the projected global demands for Aluminium. Interestingly, this refusal to ‘speak in code’, was encoded by the several western activists who were associated with the struggle. This encoding took the shape of a mediatised identification of the tribe with the Na’vi, the heroes of a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster who too resist a mining corporation – with sacred discourse as well as all-out violence. The ‘encoding’ of their resistance was ‘heard’ by the government, with in fact more receptivity than was required for keeping the mining company away from their home in the Niyamgiri hills (several legal actions have been taken against Vedanta Resources by the Indian Government) – but does this speech act of allowing themselves to be represented as the real life Na’vi, constitute a victory over their subaltern status? Are the Dongaria Kondhs using simulacra to fight a mode of hyper-real (re)production that they do not wish to participate in? This article will explore these paradoxes and will attempt to contribute to the theorizing on social movements.