Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This Introduction to the book presents its research context and significance. It explains that the ‘critical’ turn in social justice theory results from the recent acknowledgement among theorists that the core challenge of identity-based social movements is not necessarily a false internal dilemma between cultural recognition and material distributive claims but rather to do with ‘politics’—that is, the relations, structures, and bounded communities that determine who can make claims and how they can make claims before the state, before political representatives, and before one another. The Introduction explains the challenges Indigenous subalterns face when engaging in recognition politics within an ethnic system characterized by huge power differentials, as is the case in Jharkhand, and it highlights that distinguishing expressive partisanship rooted in Indigenous subaltern identity from the instrumental choices that social groups make every day to negotiate with dominant interests can help us to understand the internal tensions, aspirations, and possibilities of recognition politics.