02 ISSUE XI
MAY 2026
MAY 2026
The forest People
A new book revolves around the struggles of indigenous people in India over land and resources.
By Niyati Pendekanti
Arpitha Kodiveri is a professor of political science at Vassar College in upstate New York and an environmental justice scholar. Her latest book, GOVERNING FORESTS: STATE, LAW AND CITIZENSHIP IN INDIA’S FORESTS, revolves around the struggles of Adivasis, whose collective name translates to “original inhabitants” in Sanskrit and refers to the indigenous peoples of India.
At the start of April, she visited New York City to present the main arguments at an event at The New School.
Image by Parivartan Sharma, via Reuters.
Kodiveri began by highlighting how crucial the labor, care, and work of Adivasi communities are, and dedicated her own book and work to them.
Constructions of nationalism in India have often relegated these communities to the border regions, or excluded them altogether. Beyond exclusion, they have been systematically created as “criminal subjects in the colonial and postcolonial state project of resource appropriation – whether as ‘encroachers’ on their own lands or ‘extremists’ exercising their livelihoods and political freedoms.” The proliferation of media, as Benedict Anderson theorizes, has only worked to solidify these constructions in public consciousness and public imaginings of a very specific Indian identity.
The dominant form of conservation in India is exclusionary – it holds that, in order to conserve spaces, they need to be inviolable to people. This architecture of forest law, Kodiveri pointed out, is embedded in coloniality, in which much of the legal history has focused on maximizing extraction while avoiding resource depletion. Stories of communities being displaced for the construction of a steel plant, conservation of a tiger reserve, coal mining, and so on, were all too common throughout her fieldwork.
In the 1990s, the Indian government made it legal to evict communities from forested land, sparking widespread Adivasi protest and leading to the more progressive Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006. That being said, many Dalit communities in the state of Uttar Pradesh tried to use the FRA, but found that it recognized the land rights of only certain Scheduled Tribes (STs) and not Dalits. This depicts how the grammar of exclusion further pervades and extends within the marginalized, as state violence is experienced differently along the intersections of, in this case, caste, but also gender, religion, and class.
The dispossession of land is one of colonialism’s cruelest tactics, reminding me of the experiences of black South Africans during apartheid there. An Adivasi activist in Orissa said that, on being displaced from her home, she had lost her dignity and pride, but also her capacity to imagine the future. The attachment to land runs so deep that “dispossession is seen as an erasure of identity, and the law as a site of negotiation to regain identity,” according to Kodiveri.
Kodiveri drew attention to how forest-dwelling communities creatively engage with the law to circumvent the state and retain or regain their rights. Even when faced with unreasonable laws and conditions, such as being required to provide proof that three generations of their families have lived on the land in question, they rally together and reach out to activists and lawyers like Professor Kodiveri to help them find paths to redressal. However, the law is also malleable to the state, which abuses its power to entrap people in bureaucratic nightmares, whether by complicating the process of acquiring forest rights or by registering false cases against the opposition and those in its way.
Power, culture, and violence weave through encounters between the state and forests, as forest-dwelling communities strive to formulate or sustain their forms of sovereignty, away from the state's gaze. Although this case might qualify as a social movement by Tilly’s criteria, with displays of campaign, repertoire, and WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment), I think it has gone beyond just a social movement. Rather, it is an ongoing struggle that has over centuries become a part of these communities’ way of life, a repertoire of everyday acts of resistance, without which their survival is not guaranteed and their existence at risk.
niyati pendekanti recently graduated with an MA in International Affairs from The New School.