History - Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

https://dspace.uohyd.ac.in/handle/1/124

Browse

Browsing History - Publications by Author "Bhukya, Bhangya"
  • Item
    Adivasis and land assertion in Andhra agency
    ( 2010-10-01) Bhukya, Bhangya
    The colonial land tax system, designed to stimulate the extension of commercial agriculture and commoditification of agricultural production, has severe impacts on the adivasis of India. Particularly, the notion of colonial rule of property evicted millions of adivasis out of their land by force and for mollified debts. This process has been witnessed more widely in the post-colonial India. Using their own method of struggle, the educated adivasi youths began to reassert their lands that their forefathers lost to non-adivasis. The interventions of civil society (NGO) diverted the adivasis toward a so called legal fight which did not take the issue to a logical end. The legal process helped the non-adivasis to legalize their illegal holdings in the Agency tracts of Andhra region of Andhra Pradesh. © 2010 IUP.
  • Item
    Between Tradition and modernity nizams, colonialism and modernity in hyderabad state
    ( 2013-11-30) Bhukya, Bhangya
    The British colonial state in India ensured that the princely states were picturised as backward enclaves that kept alive an older feudal polity characterised by autocracy and underdevelopment, while British India moved towards modernity and capitalist development. However, the reality was that while the princes appeared superficially to enshrine an exotic Oriental past in their courtly and private life, the general development was carried out on the line of the colonial model. The ideological boundaries between the princely states and British territories were fluid and there was visible cross-pollination between the sociocultural and political issues and movements of the two territories. In fact, the colonial state used a number of methods to produce the effect of colonial power in the princely states. The coastal Andhra ruling class has continued a similar strategy after the formation of Andhra Pradesh state in order to subordinate the people of Telangana.
  • Item
    'Delinquent subjects': Dacoity and the creation of a surveillance society in Hyderabad state
    ( 2007-04-01) Bhukya, Bhangya
    This article examines how dacoities in colonial India began largely during famines, and how they were perpetuated by the state's cruel practices of detention and surveillance. When dacoity was seen to be a threat to civil society and the state, the authorities deployed a variety of methods to put down, control, punish and reform the dacoits, many of who were considered to belong to 'criminal tribes/communities'. The creation of a body of anthropological knowledge about the 'criminal' communities was important in this respect, as it helped the state to separate supposedly 'delinquent' from 'honest' subjects. It also conferred a specific social identity upon such groups, thereby socially stigmatising them. The creation of a surveillance society served colonial ends. The Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 provided for those designated as criminal tribes to be registered with local police stations, to be confined to specific villages, fined, punished, and put in reformatories. Groups that suffered such a fate thereafter found it so difficult to earn an honest livelihood that they became even more likely to commit dacoities. The itinerant Lambadas of Hyderabad state who were so incarcerated were particularly hard hit.
  • Item
    Featuring adivasi/indigenous studies
    ( 2021-06-19) Bhukya, Bhangya
    The possibilities and impossibilities of carving out a separate Adivasi/indigenous studies field within Indian academia are foregrounded. Counterposing the existing modernist and integrationist studies which endeavoured to weave the multiple histories into one singular Adivasi subjectivity to provide an ontological and epistemological understanding of Adivasi society, it proposes an alternative approach to read and analyse Adivasi society on the foundation of indigeneity, which makes a case for the federation of Adivasi/indigenous studies from a politico-epistemological perspective, as the Adivasi question is mainly both political and epistemological.
  • Item
    The lost ground: The fate of the Adivasi collective rights in Telangana under the regimes of property rights
    ( 2020-04-04) Bhukya, Bhangya
    The Adivasis of India have a long history of collective community rights over forest resources and land. The colonial state revenue and forest regulations replaced these community collective rights with the individual property rights, which ceased Adivasi free access to resources and evicted them from their land by force. To undo the historical wrongs, the postcolonial state had intervened with a programme of “right approach” under which Adivasi rights over forest resources and land was ensured. But, this was again stalled by its institutions and legal system. Thus, we need to think about Adivasi collective rights beyond the state legal framework which can ensure them free use of resources in forests and hills.
  • Item
    The mapping of the adivasi social: Colonial anthropology and adivasis
    ( 2008-12-01) Bhukya, Bhangya
    The construction of textual knowledge about Indian communities in the colonial milieu resulted in an extensive literature on almost all communities that was not only used as a source of legal and general administration but also to establish colonial domination. In this process the adivasis of India were constructed apposite to civilised society, therefore a distinct society. Unfortunately, post-colonial scholarship did not decolonise this colonial construction of adivasi society.
  • Item
    The subordination of the sovereigns: Colonialism and the Gond Rajas in central India, 1818-1948
    ( 2013-01-01) Bhukya, Bhangya
    British colonial intervention in India had sought to establish an exclusive sovereignty as was embodied in the modern state of the West. India had a tradition of existence of multiple sovereignties even during the times of strong imperial powers. Pre-colonial imperial powers had enjoyed symbolic sovereignty particularly over forest and hill areas, while local powers had undisputed sovereignty over resources and people in their territories. The British colonial state disturbed this shared sovereignty by assimilating the local sovereign powers into the state through a programme of colonial modernity, treaties, agreements and by force. This process produced contested histories. However, local powers such as the Gond Rajas were, to some extent, reduced to a subordinate position. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012.
  • Item