Mining in a Sacred Landscape: Adivasis, Deities and Alliances in a Former Princely State in Odisha/India

Abstract

The papers explores ideas of a sacred landscape inhabited by indigenous people as well as other communities, deities as well as other beings manifested in localities and ‘objects’ forming various relationships, alliances and a thick web of relationality in a former kingdom in central-eastern India. It introduces these historically evolved ties through the foundational narratives as well as contemporary rituals, while the area is undergoing major transformations after Indian independence and even more so in a phase of accelerated industrialisation, especially tied to a mining boom and sponge iron factories. The latter not only threatens to uproot an existing, though changing sacrificial polity around local deities, but it also has massive ecological consequences and leads to partially successful protests.