Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings by Pooja Parmar. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 262 pp. £67 hardcover.

Abstract

Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism, in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings by Pooja Parmar. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 262 pp. £67 hardcover.Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings sets out with the twin objective of understanding both and indigeneity through the Plachimada struggle of India's indigenous people, the Adivasi, against the Coca Cola bottling facility in Kerala. These objectives, however, also unpack the meta narrative of what it means to be the most dispossessed. As Parmar describes at the very outset, it means more than losing one's land and water-it is also to experience an injustice that often goes unrecognized. The book, as she states, is an attempt to understand the violence of such injustice.Indeed, the violence of that injustice is carefully spread out in the seven chapters of the book where multiple accounts of the Plachimada are carefully woven together to primarily ask two questions; what has the dispute meant to its actors and how can we indeed understand the multiple advanced by the different actors in that struggle? Parmar shows how the meanings that emerge in their day to day lives are considerably different from the ones which are placed on the Samara Pandal (protest hut) by their and supporters, and again, when they are placed before the formal legal system. In both cases, new meanings of claims emerge and crystallize, whereas some old meanings are lost, either in the impossibility of or in the rigidity of formal legal institutions. The constitutiveness of law or legal consciousness acknowledges that law's power is discursive and productive as well as coercive where law helps shape the meaning that people make of their day to day lives (Merry 1990; Sarat and Kearns 1993), and that law is culture (Ewick and Silbey 1998); therefore, what and claims mean to the actors of the Plachimada struggle are essential to understand that constitutiveness of law. More importantly, what indeed frames the legal consciousness of injustice, that constantly shape the meanings of claims and resistance of the community that eventually are transformed (or left ««.transformed)?The first chapter introduces the project and Parmar's central questions, assumptions and challenges. As a project it sets out to not only scrutinize but to understand-the clashes between different normative worlds and their different narratives, migration, and destruction of meanings of the indigenous narrative upon by their representatives and the role of itself in an unequal world as an experience of loss; she complicates the role of further by turning the anthropological gaze inwards in a lesson in ethical research by acknowledging her linguistic limitations in the translation of unfamiliar stories narrated in unfamiliar languages into a familiar language and how she overcame them. The second chapter locates the by situating the Plachimada struggle in the complex matrix of history of the region and people, including indigenous people as well as settlers in the region, the setting up of the Coca Cola factory and depletion of groundwater, the meaning and importance of water itself in the community and the subsequent dispute. The struggle to protect water does not become an event in itself; rather it becomes the process through which past struggles and events are connected. This chapter also provides an account of the protest by the community and the subsequent litigation, though both are dealt with later in greater detail in other chapters. The third chapter outlines the transformation of Plachimada from a local struggle to a global event, identified as a people's resistance movement. In this politics of transformation, the chapter indicates how the strategies of Plachimada's various supporters and outsiders in varying categories of social activists, human rights activists, anti-globalization activists, environmental rights activists, etc. …