Narratives of Resilience from an Adivasi Village in Eastern India: Towards a Decolonial Epistemology

In a growing discourse and practice of climate ‘solutions’ which are quite exclusionary, this paper aims to contribute towards making the ‘Anthropocene’ more inclusive by arguing that this is only possible by incorporating values which have been embedded in indigenous lifestyles and epistemologies. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study based out of a remote hamlet in the southwestern forests of West Bengal, India, the paper describes how these indigenous Adivasi communities, at their everyday level, cope with an impending environmental crisis, consisting of pre-colonial historical contestations over natural resources to the continuing colonial legacy and politics of forest governance in independent India; coupled with an upcoming hydropower project in their forests. This instance of ‘greenwashing’ is set to further dispossess thousands in these hills and disrupt lives of millions in the plains who are dependent on the existing hydro-ecological landscape of these forests; and most importantly reinstate the universal neoliberal model of ‘development.’ In this context the paper describes the various strategies taken up by the communities, in the form of legal recourse, traditional social institutions and democratic processes, the country’s first community forest tenure framework, alliances with non-Adivasi environmentalists, NGOs etc. to exert an agency and make their voices heard. The paper further argues how these lived experiences should not be limited to grassroot activism and consciousness but must feed into policy and academic discourse by respecting and recognising the continuity of the nature-culture, socio-political worldviews and bringing in the indigenous as coeval discussants. Adopting Jerry Manders’ paradigm wars framework, this particular case is demonstrative of similar global stories of rooted resistance and resilience which are the very spaces from where the excesses of the Anthropocene are challenged, giving way to more just and sustainable vernacular alternatives.