Shadows of Colonialism: Structural Violence, Development and Adivasi Rights in Post-Colonial Madhya Pradesh

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the status of tribal communities in central India through the lens of structural violence. In the process, a new and normatively grounded definition of violence is put forward which addresses weaknesses in the original definition proposed by Johan Galtung. The paper connects this new definition of structural violence to developmentalist and capitalist ideology, frameworks that benefit tribal communities by some empirical measures, but which must be recognised as profoundly violent in the normative contexts of those communities. Adivasis are caught between the competing imperatives of the Indian state's different and overlapping stages of modernist development: the remnants of the old colonial ‘civilising’ mission, a post-colonial nationalist industrialism and a post-industrial urge toward conservation. I argue that Galtung's definition is ill-suited to the task of describing this type of post-colonial structural violence, and that my definition solves this problem by accounting for the violence of conflicting normative frameworks.