Ecological ethnicity in the making: Developmentalist hegemonies and emergent identities in India

The Continuing Struggle for India's Jharkhand: Democracy, Decentralisation and the Politics of Names and Numbers

“…To suggest that tribal identities in Jharkhand are becoming more fluid is not to suggest that what Pramod Parajuli has called an 'adivasi cosmovision' is unimportant in eastern India. 29 Nor is it to deny that large numbers of adivasi people have been marginalised by the processes of economic development I have described, or have not been its major victims in terms of loss of lands. Nor must we suppose that a more imaginative Jharkhandi politics cannot be conjured up, in which a sensitivity to the changing ways of being of tribal people might be combined with some recognition of the rights of those who have settled in the region more recently.…”

“We don’t want to eat coal”: Development and its Discontents in a Chhattisgarh district in India

“…The burden of resource extraction for the benefit of elite minorities has been borne by the marginalized and immiserated majority. As Parajuli puts it, for the poor in India, the issue is no less than the "right to life," while for the privileged few, the issue is the "right to property" (Parajuli, 1996). The last word therefore, should go to an elder of the Sahara village who put the case of his villagers poignantly: This land is our mother and we cannot go to another land by selling her.…”

Book Review Essay : Are there systems of knowledge? peasant styles of cognition and the regimes of truth

“…What then are the discursive as well as practical implications of peasant and indigenous traditions of knowledge for the future? I have argued elsewhere (Parajuli 1996; forthcoming) that debates over traditions of knowledge have deeper implications for how ethno-ecological communities at grassroots level are asserting their aspirations towards autonomous governance at the community level. The resurgence of interest in peasant technology not only indicates a failure of the dominant paradigm of knowledge but also proves the resiliency of peasant culture.…”