DISPLACEMENT, DETERRITORIALIZATION AND DISPOSSESSION: SOCIAL LIFE AMONG ADIVASI COMMUNITIES OF WAYANAD, KERALA UNDER COLONIAL CATASTROPHE1800-1900

Abstract

The Wayanad district of Kerala has the highest population of Scheduled Tribe communities in the state, and hosts one of the most important indigenous cultural landscape areas of South India. Relying on insights from the various Adivasi, this article highlights the culture and social life of the core Adivasi of Wayanad namely: Paniya, Kurichya, Mullukuruma, Adiya, Kattunaikka, Vettakuruma, ThachanadanMooppan and Wayanad Kadar. Using census data, ethnographic studies, government reports and contemporary scholarship, provides a history of indigenous life in the area that looks at the historical, economic and socio-cultural processes that have changed native lives. The themes of land alienation, forest rights, kinship systems, rituals, language and livelihoods, education and political mobilization are explored with a particular focus. The article proposes that the understanding of the present-day Adivasi experience critically needs to be approached outside of a homogenous tribal perspective in Wayanad. Instead, each community is located in a specific historical place with respect to wider global agrarian and labour, forestry regulations and state presence. Though extensive deposition of land firmed by the colonial regime, plantation expansion, conservation regime and also post independence migration have helped them in the process of deposition, Adivasi communities today, have shown enormous cultural resistance by preserving their oral narratives, ritual practices, indigenous ecological knowledge, and collective political action. It argues that secure land tenure and effective and authentic enactment of forest rights is central in alleviating ongoing inequities and to the cultural survival of indigenous peoples in Wayanad.