Abstract
In late 2008 a five-minute video clip entitled Gaon Chodab Nahin (literally, “We Shall Not Leave Our Village”) came into circulation among activists and grassroots NGOs in the forest highlands of eastern India. To those who watched and passed on the video throughout the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa, it summed up the plight of adivasi or “tribal” populations in the region as they battled an emerging state–corporate nexus whose plans for rapid industrialization in India relied on greater access to forest and mineral resources. This essay critically interrogates the myriad lives of this video clip through a close study of the real and virtual arenas in which it came to be viewed and engaged by different audiences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the forest state of Jharkhand in eastern India, I examine how developmental NGOs, indigeneity activists and rural adivasi villagers came to view and interpret this video differently. These different interpretations, I show, simultaneously perpetuate and destabilize established ideas of “primitivism” in postcolonial India, especially when some adivasi subjects talk back to their well-meaning patrons and critique representations of themselves. Might the production of “primitive” subjects be, I ask, paradoxically conjoined to processes of primitive accumulation in postcolonial India?
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