Colonial constructions of “Agency Tracts” in Southern Odisha, India

In this Research in Progress seminar PhD Researcher Sanchita Bakshi will examine the presence of the colonial state in the hill tracts of Southern Odisha, India in the early 19th century. She will focus on a set of issues around the imposition of a Permanent Settlement and the implication of this new political economy into the old political logic in which law, state and property were linked in very different ways.

About the research

Caught as they were in these “wild geographies” inhabited by the local Khond population, who refused to comply, British resorted to creating an exceptional identity for adivasi areas and adivasi people. This marked the beginning of a longer-term process of peripheralization critically impacting adivasi access to the means of production and reproduction, mainly land and forest. 

Sanchita’s broader interest, in fleshing out these historical details, is to examine the material and discursive processes through which an adivasi region is marginalized. At the same time she remains keenly interested in conjunctural possibilities that opens up spaces of resistance within hegemonic formations.