Bhangya Bhukya delivered a lecture on ‘Colonialism, Nationalism and Adivasi: Resistances in India’. It was chaired by Sanjukta Das Gupta.
Adivasis were the first people to wage war against the British colonial expansion in India. Furthermore, their war continued through colonial rule, and even after the post-colonial period in a much more violent path. The question now is how do we see the continuum of these resistances. Particularly in the context of Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav celebrations by the Indian government. If the anti-colonial resistances of Adivasis are nationalist, what are their post-colonial resistances? Are they anti-national? Or national in their own right? The other question to be raised in this lecture is can we see the colonial and post-colonial Adivasi resistances in the same lexicon.
Bhangya Bhukya is Head of the Department of History, University of Hyderabad. He was a British Council Visiting Fellow at SOAS, London. He is a public intellectual involved in Adivasi and Dalit-Bahujan movements in India. His influential works includes The Roots of the Periphery, A History of the Gonds of Deccan India and Subjugated Nomads: The Lambadas under the Rule of the Nizam.
Sanjukta Das Gupta is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Indian History, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
Friday, 13 May 2022, 4.30 pm, Zoom https://bit.ly/3xXrH42
