Adivasi Indigeneity and Caste Capitalism

Adivasi Indigeneity has long been cast as an exceptional and constructed indigeneity, which has served to isolate debates about the Adivasi condition and politics from debates in global Indigeneities. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of Adivasi Indigeneity itself reifies Indigeneity in terms of immutable and essential bodily differences rather than engaging it as a racialized condition profoundly wrought by capital. By examining historiographic practices through which Adivasis became understood as capital's Other in India, this paper argues not just for an understanding of caste and race in fundamentally economic terms, but also Indigeneity as a particularly vexed fulcrum of caste capitalism that illuminates caste and race resonances.