Shadows of Colonialism

Structural Violence, Development and Adivasi Rights in Post-Colonial Madhya Pradesh

Bibliographic Data

ID7213538
AuthorsAshish Akhil Vaidya (Colorado State University Pueblo, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume41
Issue2
Pages315-330
Publication date2018-02-18
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSouth Asia Journal of South Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0085-6401 • E-ISSN: 1479-0270
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00856401.2018.1428044
OpenAlexW2791355462
LanguageEN
Citations received5

This paper examines the status of tribal communities in central India through the lens of structural violence. In the process, a new and normatively grounded definition of violence is put forward which addresses weaknesses in the original definition proposed by Johan Galtung. The paper connects this new definition of structural violence to developmentalist and capitalist ideology, frameworks that benefit tribal communities by some empirical measures, but which must be recognised as profoundly violent in the normative contexts of those communities. Adivasis are caught between the competing imperatives of the Indian state's different and overlapping stages of modernist development: the remnants of the old colonial 'civilising' mission, a post-colonial nationalist industrialism and a post-industrial urge toward conservation. I argue that Galtung's definition is ill-suited to the task of describing this type of post-colonial structural violence, and that my definition solves this problem by accounting for the violence of conflicting normative frameworks

Colonialism · Ideology · Nationalism · Normative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Structural violence · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub