This is a book about subaltern politics in India—and especially about what happens when subaltern groups organise and mobilise to stake democratic claims in relation to the state. What makes it possible for them to come together? What kind of claims and demands do these groups articulate? How do they engage with the state, its representatives, and its institutions? What changes can subalterns bring about through collective action? In the following pages, I try to answer these questions through a detailed case study of local social movements among Bhil Adivasis in western Madhya Pradesh.

The term Adivasi literally means First Inhabitant, and expresses a claim to being indigenous. The origins of the term can be traced to 1930s, and the efforts of activists from tribal groups in what is now the state of Jharkhand to stake a claim for recognition in the context of the making of a new nation. ‘[M]ost of you here are intruders as far as I am concerned’, the Adivasi leader Jaipal Singh Munda told India's Constituent Assembly in 1946. ‘I take you all at your word’, he continued, ‘that now we are going to start a new chapter, a chapter of independent India where there is equality of opportunity, where no one would be neglected’ (cited in Guha 2007a: 318). As it turned out, the Indian state did not recognise Adivasis as indigenous people. Rather, in state discourse they are defined as Scheduled Tribes under the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution, which provide a range of protective legislation, special entitlements, and reservations for Adivasis in public sector employment and higher education. Moreover, the Indian state has fundamentally betrayed Jaipal Singh Munda's hopes that Independence would usher in a new age of greater equality and recognition—a betrayal that is writ large in the fact that an estimated 45 per cent of India's 104 million Adivasis currently live below the country's poverty line (World Bank 2011).

In recent years, Adivasis have occupied a fairly prominent place in public debates in India. This is due in no small part to the fact that Adivasi communities are widely believed to constitute the core support base of what former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once labelled as the country's ‘gravest internal security threat’—namely the Maoist insurgency in the so-called Red Corridor.