Differential Subalterns in a New Social Movement to Prevent Bauxite Extraction on the Niyamgiri Mountain in Eastern India

The Niyamgiri movement in Eastern India witnessed the participation of several kinds of actors, ranging from indigenous villagers to European governments. This paper will examine how those threatened by environmental risks, such as inhabitants of the region around the mining project against which the movement was launched, responded through symbolic action, legal mobilization, ‘pure politics’, media activism and contingent alliances with political parties. Across these strategies, the trope of indigeneity as symbiosis with Nature can be traced as a theme countering the philosophy of industrialized development of which the proposed mining project at Niyamgiri was to be an example, as well as a tool encouraging/facilitating state and trans-national sympathy for the protest movement. The operationalization of this theme by non-indigenous inhabitants of the region around Niyamgiri, the legacy of the presence of this theme in Indian culture, and official state reception of it in legal, legislative and discursive terms, will constitute the paper’s first layer of analysis. The second layer of analysis will focus on why non-indigenous actors who had valid reasons of their own for opposing the mining project, chose to rally around this theme, and project the cause of the indigenous villagers who were threatened with the loss of their land, to the forefront of the movement. This analysis will be undertaken with the help of subaltern theory and new social movement theory. The non-indigenous villagers will be analysed as differential subalterns and the Niyamgiri movement as a new social movement. Indigeneity as lying in the space of tension between exclusion and freedom, will be explored as a potentially useful concept for the provocation of public debate on the validity of mainstream industrialized development – the paper will analyse whether indigeneity then remains a legal/strategic instrumentalization  or goes beyond to become  a call to broad-based cultural critique/renewal?