Ethnographies of States and Tribes in Highland Odisha (SPECIAL ISSUE : The Bison and the Horn : Indigeneity, Performance, and the State of India)

Abstract

In this article, I introduce the discrepancies between official and ethnographic views on conditions in the highlands of the province of Odisha, the western and tribal half of the province. For tactical reasons, the colonial government joined it with the Hindu coastal zone, even though Odisha’s borders cut through several major tribal territories with millions of inhabitants. Amazingly, very little field research has been conducted in these highlands, and the major anthropological schools have almost entirely neglected them. For millennia, empires or petty kingdoms have tried in vain to subjugate the highlanders, but during the last decades major industrial ventures by national and international trusts have entered the hills. Numerous state efforts at “development” have amounted to the transformation of free cultivators with a local religion into Hindu untouchables in slums. However, most of the unique tribal social structures continue to exist, though “education,” as the major state effort, tries to undo them.