Abstract

This article asks what makes people Indigenous and tribal, and what that designation means to those who live it. The article views state mandates not as external judgements placed on identity, but as a factor in how individuals understand, assert, and deny belonging. Drawing on selected global scholarship in sustained dialogue with India, it argues that indigenity and tribalness take shape where community self-understanding meets classificatory law. Blood-quantum rules, documentary tests of territory, and India’s Scheduled Tribe criteria do not merely register a prior people. They enter everyday perception of who counts, whose child inherits a category, and whose history of movement becomes a ground for disqualification.

India is the analytical centre. The Scheduled Tribe framework opens reservations, representation, and constitutional safeguards while retaining state authority over who is tribal. The findings develop the grounding case about Adivasi communities in Assam—Munda, Santal, Oraon, Kurmi, Gond, Bhumij, Lohar, Turi, and related groups—whom colonial indenture, famine-related rehabilitation, and displacement following an upsurge in Chotanagpur, Odisha, and adjoining regions brought. They now live in tea-garden settlements and in dispersed communities across the state. Listed as Scheduled Tribes in their states of origin, they remain excluded in Assam. That split is not only a policy mismatch. It is lived-in certificates that do not travel, labour lines without title, wages and welfare keyed to a labour category, and election-time promises of inclusion. The colonial label “tea tribe” condenses the same perception: distinct peoples reduced to a function in the plantation.

For these communities, being Adivasi means ancestral names, Sarna practice, languages such as Mundari, Sadri, and Ho, and a forced movement they refuse to call voluntary migration. Being a Scheduled Tribe means a constitutional name that confirms this account elsewhere and withholds it where they now make home. The article sets out classification, epistemic conflict, and world-making as conceptual frames, then follows their double meaning through strategic engagement with law, defence of community knowledge against the labour archive, and world-making that does not wait for the list. The framework considers gender as inherent to that perception, not as an independent case. Meaningful recognition, it argues, must rest on self-identification, territorial redress, community governance, gender justice, and the capacity to determine collective futures, because policy is already inside the experience it claims only to administer.

Keywords: Adivasi Assam; Bureaucratic violence; Capability deprivation of Indigenous Peoples; Epistemic injustice of Tribes; Relational sovereignty; Scheduled Tribe; Self-determination among Tribes; Self-identification of Indigenous Peoples; State recognition of Communities.

 

1. Introduction: What makes a people Indigenous or Tribal, and what that means

For Indigenous and tribal communities, the name one bears is not an abstract legal question. The name connects to land, kinship, memory, work, political voice, and the capacity to imagine a future. States also tie it to the mandates they used to count, protect, and exclude. Blood-quantum rules, enrolment rolls, documentary tests of territory, and lists of Scheduled Tribes do not stand outside identity and then judge it. They enter lived perception: whose child inherits a category, whose occupancy is a favour of employment, whose history of movement counts as belonging or as disqualification. One cannot separate these mandates from the definition of what makes a people Indigenous or tribal and the meaning that designation holds for those who experience it.

That meeting produces a paradox. State recognition can open rights, welfare, representation, land protections, and legal remedies. The same system can require conformity to state standards of authenticity, ancestry, territorial attachment, or administrative legibility. Communities with histories heavily shaped by colonial dispossession may face the most thorough disqualification from systems aiming to address it. In North America, blood-quantum requirements and enrolment rules compel Indigenous peoples to establish belonging through genealogical archives and state-recognised records (Carson et al., 2024). Documentary proof of historical territory in Ecuador can privilege the colonial archive over oral histories and lived relations (Martínez, 2025). In India, the Scheduled Tribe system, shaped by colonial classification, still places state institutions at the centre of tribal recognition (Damodaran, 2006; Nixon, 2025). In each setting, the mandate is not merely a gate. It becomes part of how people learn what their own account of themselves is worth.

India is the analytical centre because the Scheduled Tribe category makes this join sharp. Scheduled Tribe is a constitutional classification. It can enable reservations, representation, welfare, and special protections. Adivasi is a political, historical, and often territorial name for belonging, dignity, and collective memory. The two relate to each other but are not identical. ST status matters materially. Prasad (2022) argues that the administrative category fails to fully encompass Adivasi identity. To be tribal, here, is to live both the name one uses and the name the list will or will not confirm.

The grounding case, developed in the findings, is Adivasi communities in Assam, drawn from among the Munda, Santal, Oraon, Kurmi, Gond, Bhumij, Lohar, Turi, and related groups. Three connected histories produced their presence. The largest wave came as indentured labourers recruited by the colonial tea industry from the 1840s (Sharma, 2011; Behal, 2014). A second arrived through famine, including conditions linked in community and activist histories to the manipulation of food supplies in Chotanagpur and Santhal Pargana, and through government relief and resettlement in lower Assam (Horo, 2002; Kandulna, 2002). A third comprised people displaced by a tribal upsurge in hinterland regions, the precursor movements to the Jharkhand struggle. The same communities participated in all three, but officials refused to recognise their tribal identity.

The communities display internal differentiation and maintain political connections. Some remain in plantation settlements. Others left garden employment and settled across districts. They are present in Kokrajhar; in Morigaon, Nagaon, Sonitpur, and Darrang; in Golaghat, Jorhat, Sivasagar, Dibrugarh, and Tinsukia; in Dima Hasao and Karbi Anglong; and in the Barak Valley (Kandulna, 2002; Mishra, 2005). Livelihoods diverge. Das Gupta (1990) notes that disenfranchisement and the denial of Scheduled Tribe status affect many in Assam. Researchers estimate that about six to seven million people make up the group, often accounting for between seventeen and twenty percent of the state’s population (Government of Assam, n.d.). The figure is an order of magnitude used in public and official claims, not a census category. Numerical weight has not produced constitutional protection.

The term “tea tribes,” retained here only when it appears in the cited scholarship, is itself a component of identity perceived from outside. It reduces Munda, Santal, Oraon, Kurmi, and others, each with its own language and territorial history, to a labour-market function. Communities have answered with the name Adivasi and with the names of constituent peoples. Being Adivasi, in their account, means those names, Sarna groves, Mundari, Sadri, Ho, and related languages, and a forced movement they refuse to treat as voluntary migration. The government grants constitutional recognition of Scheduled Tribe status in their original states but denies it in the areas they have settled. People experience the mismatch through certificates that stay put, housing connected to jobs, and promises that arise at elections but then fade away. The findings reveal how classification creates that mismatch and how individuals live it through labour, voice, evidence, land, and gendered entitlement.

International norms have shifted from paternalism toward self-identification. ILO Convention No. 107 portrayed Indigenous populations as requiring protection and development under state supervision (May, 2016; Damodaran, 2006). The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples marked a step toward self-determination and the right to self-identification (UNDRIP, 2007; Shrinkhal, 2021). Legal language has not displaced the state’s power to define recognizability. India has not adopted UNDRIP. These communities live with that absence: the state exercises its power to define tribal identity with no requirement to honour how the community understands itself.

This article examines that condition through a selective critical review. Recognition praxis names the processes by which communities navigate, use, contest, and exceed state systems: tactical engagement with law, defence of relational forms of life, reconstruction of community knowledge, and futures that do not depend entirely on state validation. Section 2 sets the conceptual orientation. Classification, bio-power, and colonial subjectification shape perception as mandates. The text does not employ Assam as an extended illustration. The text addresses notes on positionality and scope in Section 3. Section 4 presents the findings in sequence: layered illegibility; the three registers of lived classification; the labour archive; world-making under constraint; Scheduled Tribe and Adivasi, including the arguments against inclusion; and gendered perception. Section 5 consolidates an India-centric framework. Section 6 concludes.

Three contributions follow. First, the study views state mandates as elements of Indigenous and tribal identity in practice, instead of just hindrances to an earlier identity. Second, the dialogue places Indian tribal experience alongside global debates while recognising the uniqueness of distinct histories. Third, the Assam case demonstrates what it means to be Adivasi when the constitution withholds the name: people experience their ancestral particularity and Assam as home daily through a classification that confirms neither.

2. Conceptual Orientation: Classification as a Component of Lived Identity

The authors use postcolonial theory, political ontology, decolonial scholarship, and feminist analysis as the foundation for their examination of how status is transmitted. These perspectives do not stand above the question of what it means to be Indigenous or tribal. They show how mandates enter that meaning. Classification, evidence rules, developmental labels, and the gendered transmission of status are components of perception. These factors determine what people can know, express, and claim under the sign of tribal belonging, without exhausting the names communities use for themselves. Here, the text sets out the concepts. Their bearing on Adivasi communities in Assam is developed in the findings.

2.1 Postcolonial classification, bio-power, and the perception of illegibility

Modern state institutions inherit colonial techniques of classification. Surveys, censuses, ethnographic descriptions, land records, and administrative inquiries rendered populations legible and governable. Cohn’s investigative modalities capture how the census, survey, and legal archive produce the categories through which populations are known and administered (Cohn, 1996). Scott demonstrates state projects simplify complex social and ecological relations into forms that people can count, map, and manage (Scott, 1999). This history forms the basis of the Scheduled Tribe category. Colonial and postcolonial administrations have relied on “primitive traits”, “backwardness,” geographical isolation, and cultural difference to identify tribal populations (Damodaran, 2006; Nixon, 2025). Such criteria can ground safeguards. They also freeze dynamic identities into stereotypes that cannot accommodate dispossession, migration, labour, and political change. For those who live under them, the criteria are not only an external test. A person may know itself as tribal and still learn, at the certificate office or scrutiny file, that this knowledge does not count.

Foucault’s bio-power names the mechanisms by which the state regulates life by classifying, measuring, and administering populations (Foucault, 1998). It works through categorisation and regulation of access to rights, not only overt coercion. In Indian tribal recognition, it operates through the Scheduled Tribe list, the scrutiny committee, the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group designation, the certificate system, and land regimes that decide whose presence is legal. These instruments determine who counts, whose forest rights are valid, and whose children inherit a constitutional identity. The state does not simply acknowledge a pre-existing tribe. It shapes the claims that people can make under that name. Illegibility is not an absence of records. It is the effect of records built for a purpose other than the identity now being claimed.

Fanon’s account of colonial subjectification addresses what this apparatus does to personhood (Fanon, 2004). Colonial powers do not only mis-describe people from outside. Colonial powers create the categories that force the colonised people to live, think, and act within them. The apparatus interpellates the subject into an identity that allows some claims and denies others. Dignity can then depend on becoming legible in a language one did not author. Three registers follow. Here, we present them as concepts. How people live them in Assam’s tea gardens represents a discovery.

The first is labour as a colonising classification. An administrative category can legally supersede a tribal name, recording wages, deductions, and restrictions on movement rather than cultural particularity or political history. When that category organises housing, rations, and daily life, people can adopt it as their primary frame of self-understanding. Limited schooling restricts the tools people use to name subordination. Capability deprivation, in Sen’s and Nussbaum’s sense, is then not only a welfare deficit. It limits epistemic access to other descriptions of oneself (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000; 2011; Das Gupta, 1990).

The second is political voice. Electoral mobilisation can channel numerical weight that should become structural power. Promises of recognition circulate when votes are needed and recede afterwards. Fanon’s account of political consciousness appropriated into forms that serve domination applies where leverage is real and its structural expression is repeatedly foreclosed (Fanon, 2004).

The third involves compelled mimicry. Communities seeking inclusion must re-present themselves in the state’s language — traits, isolation, backwardness, fixity — even when those criteria come from the apparatus that dispossessed them. The state makes identity legible by sacrificing what does not fit. Fanon’s colonial wound, read with Coulthard (2014), names this demand. Being tribal then includes having to translate oneself into a mandate not built for one’s history.

2.2 Political ontology and the epistemic encounter

Political ontology marks conflicts that are not only policy disagreements. They concern divergent understandings of land, life, territory, evidence, and authority. De la Cadena (2010) and Blaser (2013) show Indigenous struggles as clashes between worlds: land as resource or extractive frontier, and land as ancestor, relative, or collective basis of life. Navajo and Hopi opposition to wastewater snowmaking on the San Francisco Peaks defended sacred relations that commercial utility could not capture (Sefiha & Lauderdale, 2008). Zoque opposition to megaprojects in Mexico has turned on damage to collective life-worlds, not only property (Hofmann, 2024). The issue concerns which world the state allows its evidence to represent.

The epistemic battlefield is the unequal encounter between state-sanctioned evidence and Indigenous knowledge. Agencies privilege titles, surveys, census categories, maps, and official files. Communities assert oral history, ancestral memory, relational ecological knowledge, and customary practice as valid, and often more accurate, evidence (Martínez, 2025; Gergan, 2025). India’s Forest Rights Act acknowledges community evidence of forest use and habitation in principle. Implementation has shown that the principle does not automatically become equal administrative practice. The core claim, carried into the findings, is that an archive built to manage a population can later be treated as proof that the identity it never recorded was absent. Whether erasure can count as evidence of erasure, rather than as evidence of absence, is the question on which self-understanding and the mandate meet.

2.3 Decolonial thought and world-making

Decolonial scholarship challenges the assumption that political modernity can accommodate Indigenous peoples without rethinking its premises. Quijano’s coloniality of power identifies colonial hierarchies in knowledge, identity, and political economy after formal decolonisation (Quijano, 2000). Mignolo’s colonial wound names the epistemic and existential dimensions of that domination (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). Escobar’s work on territorial rights and pluriversal worlds identifies alternatives to extractivist modernity (Escobar, 2018). The struggle over recognition is also a struggle over what is knowable and possible.

World-making, as used here, refers to practices through which communities build and project political, cultural, and ecological futures. It is not only resistance to the state. It is the making of institutions, archives, narratives, and visions that do not depend on state validation for their meaning (Escobar, 2018; Sinha, 2021). Dominant tribal policy — welfare, uplift, mainstreaming — frames Indigenous and Adivasi futures as inclusion in the existing state. World-making challenges framing. Ritual, language transmission, and organisation can be territorial claims, epistemic autonomy, and governance at once. They do not wait for the list. The mandate can withhold a constitutional name. It does not author the life. We find how that claim is lived under plantation constraint rather than assume it as a premise.

2.4 Recognition praxis and its neighbours

Recognition praxis names the repertoire through which communities live this double condition: strategic use of mandates, defence of their own knowledge, and world-making that exceeds the list. Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014) argues that liberal recognition makes Indigenous dignity contingent on state validation and redirects energy from “grounded normativity,” the land-based practices through which peoples sustain self-determining life. That critique is taken seriously here. India is not a settler colony in the Canadian or Australian sense. Its constitutional mechanisms — ST status, reservations, the Forest Rights Act, the Fifth and Sixth Schedules — can deliver protections that a pure refusal would leave unclaimed. Non-engagement is not, in the near term, a path to dignity where exclusion from reservations, welfare, scholarships, and representation is severe. Praxis includes the engagement Coulthard regards with scepticism, as one part of a wider repertoire.

Simpson’s resurgence — the renewal of Indigenous political and cultural life from within, rather than through state validation — aligns with the world-making dimension (Simpson, 2017). The difference is context. Alfred’s refusal rejects engagement with colonial state structures as inherently compromising (Alfred, 2005). This article does not treat that refusal as universally applicable. In this setting, strategic engagement is a way of navigating constraints while maintaining practices that constitute autonomy. Praxis is neither a celebration of the state nor a mandate to refuse it. It is a name for the complexity of pursuing dignity where the constitutional name is itself part of what identity means. Gender cuts across this repertoire. A category that confirms collective belonging can still transmit status through patriarchal descent, and a campaign for the list can still gatekeep voice within the community (Xaxa, 1999; Sundar, 2016; Shah, 2007; Toppo et al., 2024). The findings take up that difference as part of how people perceive the mandate, rather than treating it as a separate case.

3. Methodology and Positionality

This article is a selective critical review of scholarship. It does not claim comprehensive coverage of global Indigenous scholarship. The authors base their selection of the literature on three grounds: its relevance to the question of what makes people Indigenous or tribal, and what that means to those who live it; The findings then place those frames in sequence against the documentary and scholarly record of Adivasi communities in Assam.

Placing India at the analytical centre, rather than using Indian material as a regional illustration of a framework built elsewhere, is a deliberate choice. Prasad (2022), Xaxa (1999), and others have argued that scholars primarily developed “Indigenous peoples” in relation to settler-colonial contexts. Its application to India requires care. The nexus of Scheduled Tribe and Adivasi is not identical to First Nations in Canada or Aboriginal peoples in Australia, even where colonial classification, dispossession, and epistemic injustice make comparison possible. The Assam case makes that specificity sharp. Communities that forced labour, famine-related resettlement, and displacement produced must satisfy criteria of autochthony and isolation. Under a mandate grounded in self-identification, that history would be among the strongest grounds for recognition. Under the list as administered, it becomes a ground for exclusion. The comparison is used to illuminate this configuration, not to treat distinct peoples as interchangeable.

The author’s positionality — writing from within and in engagement with Indian scholarship on Adivasi rights, tribal policy, and constitutional politics — shapes the cases, the framing, and the citations. The authors acknowledge it as an orientation, not a disqualification. It makes it possible to take seriously Adivasi political aspirations, constitutional negotiations, and internal debates about justice, and to treat global frameworks as resources rather than as normative templates. The account of what it means to be Adivasi in Assam comes from community organisations’ public claims, existing scholarship, and the documentary record of law and policy. It is not a substitute for ethnography of kinship, sacred geography, or disagreement within garden and settled communities. Where the article speaks of lived perception, it speaks of perception as it becomes visible in that record: the certificate that does not travel, the labour line without title, the name refused by the list and asserted in organisation and ritual, and the gendered transmission of a status the community is still denied. Gender is not treated as a separate method or a separate case. They understand it as a means by which the community lives out the same mandates.

4. Findings: Mandates, Meanings, and the Assam Configuration

This section applies the concepts outlined in Section 2 one after another. The text displays illegibility in the form of a layered record. It shows subjectification in three registers. The epistemic encounter and world-making are then read against that record. The Indian configuration of Scheduled Tribe and Adivasi, and the gendered perception of the same mandates, follow from it. What it means to be Adivasi in Assam is the thread through each step.

4.1 Layered illegibility

Bio-power applies with particular force in Assam because illegibility is not a single omission. It is an interlocking apparatus. The Transport of Native Labourers Act (1863) licensed recruitment from Chotanagpur and adjoining regions into the tea gardens (Kar, 1999; Bhadra, 1999). The Workmen’s Breach of Contract Act (1859) made desertion a criminal offence, so that leaving unfree labour became a legal liability. Garden registers, contracts, and labour-line housing constituted what Das Gupta (1990) characterises as an enclave economy of unfree labour: housing, rations, medical care, and employment bundled under company control, so that exit led toward destitution rather than freedom. The labour line was bio-power rendered spatial, an enclosure that limited autonomous organisation, schooling, and alternative livelihoods (Das Gupta, 1990; Sharma, 2011). Reports indicate that the first batch recruited in 1841 from Chotanagpur died en-route from malnutrition and illness. By the early twentieth century, recruitment on a very large scale had proceeded under conditions involving fraud, forcible recruitment, kidnapping, and torture (Kar, 1999; Bhadra, 1999). Community and activist histories also link famine in Chotanagpur and Santhal Pargana to colonial control of food supplies as a recruitment pressure (Horo, 2002). That stronger claim of an orchestrated famine should be read as part of this memory, not as a settled administrative finding.

The postcolonial state reproduced the structure by other means. The Assam Fixation of Ceiling on Land Holdings Act (1956) imposed ceilings on agricultural land while exempting tea land and ancillary uses, including labour lines, as “special cultivation.” Workers occupied lines without pattas (land entitlement), occupancy tied to employment. For those settled through relief schemes, bureaucratic restrictions limited the accumulation of autonomous holdings. Throughout, authorities denied Scheduled Tribe status to communities listed as such in their states of origin when they were in Assam. Denying is itself a technology of perception. The colonial archive constituted them as workers. The postcolonial list then required a geographical fixity and cultural isolation that this archive had already made unavailable. Illegibility is how the mandate is felt. Being Adivasi here includes knowing oneself as tribal and learning, from the file, that this knowledge does not count.

4.2 Three registers of subjectification

Fanon’s three registers are not general analogies in this case. Fanon (2004) describes how people inhabit the apparatus.

The register of labour classified communities brought under indenture as “coolies.” Registers recorded wages, deductions, and movement restrictions, not cultural particularity, religious practice, or political history. Das Gupta (1990) argues that this was constitutive. Over generations, with housing and daily life organised through the company, labour-line identity could become the most available frame of self-understanding. Limited schooling reduced the tools individuals employed to identify subordination. Das and Laskar (2025) document illiteracy between 40 to 60 percent across Adivasi tea-garden communities, with only a small minority progressing beyond primary education. That pattern is a consequence of capability deprivation serving a cheap, immobile workforce, and it reproduces limited epistemic access to other self-descriptions (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000; 2011).

At the register of political voice, numerical weight has not become structural power. Researchers estimate these communities constitute approximately seventeen to twenty percent of Assam’s population and hold significance in over forty tea-garden and district constituencies (Government of Assam, n.d.; The potential power is real. They keep redirecting its expression. Forms that serve domination rather than challenge it appropriate political consciousness (Fanon, 2004).

At the register of the recognition process itself, communities seeking ST status must articulate identity in the state’s language: “primitive traits,” distinctiveness, isolation, occupational backwardness. These criteria come from the classificatory tradition that dispossessed them. They must appear as the autochthonous, fixed tribe the mid-century list imagined, although their history is forced migration, famine, displacement, and political upheaval. Fanon’s colonial wound, read with Coulthard (2014), names this demand: identity re-presented in legible form, at the cost of dimensions that do not fit. Being tribal includes the experience of having to translate oneself into a mandate that was not built for this history.

Strategic engagement is how that third register is also used. In North America, communities confronting blood-quantum and enrolment rules use genealogical reconstruction, historic rolls, mission records, and family archives to establish legal belonging (Carson et al., 2024). The records originate in colonial classification and are still used to secure continuity. In Indonesia, adat communities have used legal recognition, civil-society networks, and formal organisation to secure customary forests (Arizona et al., 2019). Bhabha’s mimicry names this partial, ambivalent use of dominant forms for community-centred ends (Bhabha, 1994). In Assam the same mode has dominated for decades: petitions to state and central governments; mobilisation through the Adivasi Oraon Association and the Cha Bagan Adivasi Students’ Association; memoranda to parliamentary committees and commissions; writ petitions before the Gauhati High Court; and electoral participation where numerical strength makes the communities unavoidable (Sharma, 2011; Das, 2016). Invocation of Articles 15, 16, and 46, and of Ambedkarite language of social justice, is mimicry in Bhabha’s sense. The constitutional idiom is the available terrain, not an acceptance of classificatory authority. A campaign sustained across committees, promises, and deferrals is evidence of agency. Failure to secure the list measures the resistance the paradox produces, not the futility of the effort. Being Adivasi includes the experience of asking, again, to be named as what one already is.

4.3 The epistemic encounter

The unequal encounter between state evidence and community knowledge runs, in Assam, through the colonial labour archive (Martínez, 2025; Gergan, 2025). Garden registers and contracts managed obligations, restrictions, and deductions. They recorded little tribal identity, ancestral territory, or political history in regions of origin. Before scrutiny committees, courts, and review commissions, the burden falls on communities to prove tribal identity through an archive designed to erase it. Within the state’s evidentiary framework, the register defines them as people whose connection to Assam began with a contract. The lived question is whether that erasure can count as evidence of erasure, rather than as evidence that tribal identity was absent; whether oral histories of displacement from Jharkhand, Odisha, and Chotanagpur can ground recognition; whether Sarna groves and the transmission of Mundari, Sadri, and Ho can count as continuing tribal life inside the enclave.

Elsewhere, the same contest over proof is visible in Tayal engagement with transitional justice, where oral histories and traditional territorial maps are placed alongside or against colonial records (Takiwatan, 2022), and in Māori assertion of mātauranga Māori as a basis for resource decisions against an environmental law that had excluded it (Whitt, 2009). In Assam, the asymmetry is stark. The state’s archive records labour migrants. Community knowledge records displaced Adivasi peoples with cultural, genealogical, and political ties to regions of origin. Elders’ oral histories, documentation of Sarna and tribal social forms in gardens and districts, and reconstruction of pre-plantation histories are acts of epistemic self-defence (Sharma, 2011; Das, 2016; Gergan, 2025). They insist that what the colonial and postcolonial state did not record can still ground the recognition it withholds. What it means to be tribal is, the authority to define one’s historical identity against a file built not to hold it.

4.4 World-making under constraint

World-making in Assam has persisted under constraints designed to prevent it. Labour-line housing, surveillance, tied rations, and restrictions on mobility and land were meant to block autonomous institutions. Exemption of tea land from ceiling laws and denial of land ownership records ponged the enclave. Within those limits, Sarna practice among Munda, Oraon, and related communities is religious life and also territorial claim, ecological knowledge, and governance outside plantation property. Transmission of Mundari, Sadri, Ho, and other languages, in gardens and in settled districts, is linguistic sovereignty: a refusal of absorption into Assamese linguistic hegemony. Organisations such as the Adivasi Oraon Association, the Cha Bagan Adivasi Students’ Association, and district bodies in Kokrajhar, Morigaon, and elsewhere build decision-making outside plantation management and outside party machinery. Engagement with the Jharkhand movement and the All-Assam Adivasi Mela reasserts ties to ancestral territories and to Adivasi collectives across India. These practices do not wait for Scheduled Tribe recognition. They are already a form of life, alongside the recognition campaign (Sinha, 2021; Gergan, 2025). Being Adivasi means this life. The mandate can withhold the constitutional name. It does not author life.

The same constructive quality appears elsewhere without being the same history. Zapatista caracoles and Afro-Colombian community councils under Law 70 of 1993 build self-governing institutions related to, but not reducible to, state recognition (Escobar, 2018). Tayal youth initiatives to document weaving, oral literature, and territorial knowledge reconstruct a relation to history beyond state-mediated justice. Gergan (2025) shows Himalayan communities building spatial imaginaries that exceed state cartographies. In Assam, Sarna practice asserts a cosmological relation to land the plantation property system cannot contain (Das, 2016; Sharma, 2011). The transmission of Mundari, Sadri, Ho, Bhumij, and other languages in gardens and in Kokrajhar, Morigaon, and Sonitpur resists linguistic absorption. Origin narratives and genealogies linking present communities to ancestral territories are archival world-making against the labour register. Participation in the All-Assam Adivasi Mela and in connection to the Jharkhand movement builds solidarities beyond the garden and the state border (Sinha, 2021; Lakra, 2024). Communities are not waiting for the list before building a future. The claim to Scheduled Tribe status draws its force from a life already being lived. Amendment of the list would be necessary and just. It would still be incomplete unless the mandate were reformed to honour history’s colonial classification erased.

4.5 Scheduled Tribe and Adivasi

The Indian paradox is distinctive: colonial classification, postcolonial constitutional architecture, and Adivasi self-articulation in a non-settler polity. ST recognition provides reservations, representation, welfare, and legal safeguards; exclusion can mean exclusion from rights and public resources. Assessment by “primitive traits,” isolation, backwardness, or cultural fixity still misses migration, labour, dispossession, and political change (Damodaran, 2006; Nixon, 2025). Scheduled Tribe is an administrative classification; Adivasi is a political and often territorial articulation of belonging, memory, and resistance. Prasad (2022) shows that identity functions as a language of resistance while remaining entangled with state recognition. Xaxa (1999) argues administrative categories are inadequate instruments of justice for peoples structurally subordinated as tribes.

Nowhere is the distinction more consequential than in Assam. States such as Jharkhand and Odisha list constituent communities as Scheduled Tribes, but Assam excludes them. This is not ambiguity about tribal identity but the application of autochthony, isolation, and occupational backwardness criteria to peoples whose presence began in forced labour, famine relief, and displacement. The history that should ground recognition becomes the basis of disqualification. As B. B. Das writes, Adivasis are settled in Assam and have made it home, with no meaningful practical return to “original homes,” yet the mode of arrival is treated as grounds for exclusion rather than dispossession requiring redress (Das, 1999; Chhetri, 2005). To be Adivasi in Assam is to live that split: home here, constitutional name elsewhere.

Denial has been justified through five recurring arguments, each a way the mandate enters perception.

The migratory-history argument holds that arrival as indentured labour means these communities cannot be indigenous tribal of Assam (Prabhakara, 2007; Moirangthem, 2007). Chhetri (2005) notes that groups across the subcontinent have histories of movement, and other communities granted ST status in Assam trace migrations to present-day East and South-East Asia. A consistent migration test would unsettle far more than the Adivasi claim. More decisively, this was not voluntary economic migration. The Transport of Native Labourers Act (1863) legalised recruitment marked by fraud, abduction, and coercion. To call forced transportation voluntary migration is to carry the colonial description into the constitutional present.

The historical-discrimination argument holds that these communities have not faced the deprivation required for ST status. The record points the other way: illiteracy of 40 to 60 percent; severe poverty; wages long below those for the same work in Kerala and Tamil Nadu; large arrears of unpaid obligations; a Comptroller and Auditor General of India (2024) audit finding coverage below 40 percent for several welfare programmes; thin access to secondary and tertiary education; and confinement to unskilled work (Das & Laskar, 2025; Banerji & Willoughby, 2019). Subordination through indenture, enclave labour, land exclusion, and non-recognition is a ground for protection, not a reason to withhold it.

The franchise-dilution argument holds that ST status would weaken protections other tribal communities, particularly in the hills, have secured. The anxiety is genuine, partly about reserved-seat arithmetic and “sons of the soil” claims, not only quotas (Lakra, 2024). It is still not a principled bar. Sixth Schedule protections for Autonomous District Councils are a distinct mechanism and coexist with ST status elsewhere. The argument is a political claim in administrative language, calling for negotiation among communities, not for the premise that Adivasi non-recognition is the price of others’ security.

The economic-contribution argument suggests inclusion must be earned. Das (1999) inverts it: tea is “the product of the cumulative toil of the labourers.” Subsistence wages, housing without title, and constitutional exclusion compound, rather than shrink, that contribution.

The assimilation argument treats Sarna practice, Mundari, Sadri, Ho, and community institutions as a failure to join Assamese society. They are the content of Adivasi autonomy. A pluralist order requires distinctiveness as a basis of inclusion, not its erasure in exchange for inclusion (Chhetri, 2005; Das, 2016).

Taken together, the five arguments use migration, discrimination history, franchise, contribution, and assimilation to deny recognition on terms the criteria were not designed to accommodate. To challenge them is to challenge the state’s authority to set the terms on which communities produced by colonial power may name themselves.

Capability deprivation is how the paradox is inhabited, not only how status is withheld (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000; 2011). Das Gupta (1990) characterises the plantation as an enclave of unfree labour under the command of capital. Labour lines restricted mixing, cultural continuity, and political exposure. Das and Laskar (2025) document illiteracy of 40 to 60 percent, primary attainment as the bulk of schooling, secondary and tertiary completion below 10 percent in several samples, student–teacher ratios of 37:1, and dropout after Classes 5–8. The Plantations Labour Act required primary facilities and gave little impetus to higher education. Mid-2020s Brahmaputra Valley wages remained far below Kerala and Tamil Nadu rates (Saha, Bhue & Singha, 2019; Government of Assam, 2023; 2026). Arrears estimated at ₹10,000–20,000 crore — provident fund, bonus, gratuity — represent unpaid obligations across decades (Saha et al., 2019). The CAG (2024) audit documents the gap between entitlement and delivery. Appropriated labour and withheld recognition are one history.

The Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group designation intensifies the paradox within the ST system. It may add welfare and also labels as vulnerable a marginalisation largely produced by state and market forces (Nixon, 2025; Damodaran, 2006). Adivasis in Assam are excluded before that hierarchy. The logic still applies: a population constituted for administration rather than as a political community. The ST certificate is the instrument through which status becomes actionable. Sundar documents the process as bureaucratic violence — procedural burdens, protracted scrutiny, genealogical demands, and litigation imposed on the most marginalised (Sundar, 2016). In Assam the certificate is desired and unreachable. Officials prevent communities from experiencing that violence.

The Assam Fixation of Ceiling on Land Holdings (Amendment) Act, 2025, later the subject of planters’ writs in the Gauhati High Court (India Today NE, 2026; Assam Tribune, 2026), aims to provide homestead pattas for labour-line land. It acknowledges a claim and shows the limit of a remedy that leaves the paradox intact. Pattas cover residential lines, not cultivable or surplus land. Compensation capped at fifty times annual land revenue is a thin basis for other livelihoods. Security for registered workers may exclude casual and contract workers, and women where the male heads are the registered names. Workers remain outside the ST list, so reservations and representation stay closed (Rasaily & Shekhawat, 2025). The Indian Tea Association, the North Eastern Tea Association, Bharatiya Cha Parishad, the Assam Tea Planters Association, and the Tea Association of India argue that an “integrated, contiguous and compact” estate cannot be severed without impairing viability (Assam Tribune, 2026). Land pledged as collateral makes acquisition a financial threat, in a sector whose costs rose sharply after 2010 while margins contracted, and where small growers, producing about 40 percent of Assam tea, have faced costs above returns (Saikia, 2025). Rasaily and Shekhawat (2025) describe the consequence: electoral weight on one side, a large land-poor population on the other. A patta without the constitutional name changes occupancy. It does not change what the list says they are.

Differentiated recognition in the Northeast has not closed the gap. The Sixth Schedule, the Inner Line Permit, and Article 371 reflect colonial demarcations and later negotiations, and have not prevented securitisation, extraction, or gendered exclusion (Kikon, 2019; Piang, 2013). Adivasi communities in tea districts and settled areas stand outside both the Sixth Schedule and the ST list. Majoritarian politics add a further layer. Distinct identities may be folded into religious or nationalist frameworks, framed as inclusion while weakening Adivasi specificity (Daftary, 2024). Development, security, and territorial integrity can cast Adivasi demands as obstacles rather than claims (Bhattacharyya, 2022; Thakur, 2024; Wadhwa, 2021). The position that all Indians are indigenous can obscure the particular dispossession on which Adivasi claims rest (Prasad, 2022). In Assam, numerical weight produces electoral significance and repeated, withdrawn promises (Sitlhou, 2021).

5. Discussion: Recognition Praxis as an India-Centered Framework

The findings show that recognition praxis is not a sequence of tactics added to an identity already complete. It is the way an identity is lived where the mandate both addresses and withholds it. Three dimensions follow. They are simultaneous. Read against Assam, they answer the article’s question more precisely than a general model of inclusion or refusal can.

Strategic engagement is the use of documents, constitutional provisions, enrolment procedures, welfare categories, and administrative recognition because access to rights often depends on them. In India, campaigns for inclusion in the Scheduled Tribe list, struggles under the Forest Rights Act, negotiations over gram Sabha authority under PESA, and the use of constitutional safeguards are forms of engagement shaped by necessity and calculation. The systems are constrained. They are also, in the present, a principal route to material and legal protection. For Adivasi communities in Assam, the multi-decadal campaign is the paradigmatic case. It has moved through government committees, parliamentary debate, judicial petitions, and electoral alliances without yet securing the constitutional objective. That record shows both the depth of resistance and a continuing strategic intelligence. Engagement continues not from naïve faith in responsiveness, but because leaving the constitutional arena would leave the most immediate dimensions of the paradox untouched: reservations, welfare, scholarships, representation. Elsewhere, the same dimension appears in blood-quantum navigation in North America, adat recognition in Indonesia, land titling in Colombia, and community policing frameworks in Mexico. In each, communities work through state systems not because those systems are adequate, but because they are the terrain on which consequential decisions about rights are made. The mandate is part of what identity means, because the name on the list changes what a life can claim. The Assam findings add a further point. Engagement is also the third register of subjectification. Communities must translate themselves into “primitive traits,” isolation, and fixity in order to be heard. Mimicry is agency and injury at once.

The epistemic encounter is the assertion of oral history, genealogical knowledge, living practice, and self-understanding against state documentation and colonial archives. It is a struggle over evidence, authority, and whether self-identification can stand against documentary scepticism. In Assam, the encounter runs through the scrutiny committee, the courthouse, and the political platform. Elders testify to displacement from Jharkhand, Odisha, and Chotanagpur. Organisations document the continuity of Sarna practice and tribal social forms. Scholars and activists mark the assumptions that disqualify migration-based tribal identities. Documentary work reconstructs what the labour archive erased (Das, 2016; Sharma, 2011; Gergan, 2025). These are forms of epistemic self-defence: knowledge the state did not record can still ground the recognition it withholds. The finding that matters for the framework is the status of the archive itself. The register was built to manage labour, not to hold tribal personhood. Treated later as proof of absence, it converts its own erasure into a ground of disqualification. Being Adivasi, in this dimension, is the refusal to let the contract be the last word on who one is.

World-making is the construction of political, cultural, and ecological futures that do not depend on state validation for their meaning. In Assam, it proceeds within the plantation enclave and its postcolonial continuation. Sarna practice asserts territorial and cosmological relations. Language transmission maintains epistemic autonomy. Organisations build decision-making capacity. Documentary projects construct alternative archives. Pan-Adivasi ties, including the All-Assam Adivasi Mela and connections to the Jharkhand movement, exceed the garden and the state border (Sinha, 2021; Lakra, 2024; Gergan, 2025). These practices are already underway, beside the recognition campaign and not after it. The claim to Scheduled Tribe recognition draws its moral force from communities whose self-determination the category only partly captures. The struggle is not to begin community life. It is to secure constitutional protection for a life already being lived, and already constituting an Adivasi future beyond what the classificatory apparatus has chosen to see. The 2025 homestead amendment sharpens the distinction. A patta can change occupancy and still leave the constitutional name untouched. A partial administrative remedy does not satisfy world-making.

Held together, the three dimensions answer what makes these peoples tribal, and what that means. It is not the list alone, and not self-naming alone. It is ancestral and linguistic particularity, a history of forced movement they refuse to call voluntary migration, and a present in which Assam is home. What that means is perceived, in part, through mandates: a constitutional name that confirms this account in the state of origin and withholds it in the state of residence; a labour category that still organises wage, housing, and welfare; a promise of inclusion that appears at elections and recedes. Gender cuts through all three. Women carry the lowest tier of garden labour, are excluded from what ST status would open, and meet a certificate and a patta regime that can transmit security through male registration and patriarchal descent. Praxis that cannot see this will mis-describe the people it claims to interpret. Praxis, on the reading offered here, is the work of living both facts — the name one uses, and the name the state controls — without surrendering either.

6. Conclusion: Lived Identity and the Limits of the List

What makes peoples Indigenous and tribal cannot be separated from how states name, protect, and exclude them. Recognition makes rights claimable while regulating the identity through which those rights are accessed. This paradox is structural to the postcolonial state–Adivasi relation, shaped by colonial classification and bio-power that constitute Adivasi peoples as governable objects rather than self-defining subjects (Foucault, 1998; Fanon, 2004). The mandate is not outside experience; it shapes how experience is perceived.

Recognition praxis names what communities do with and against this condition: strategic legal engagement, epistemic self-defence, and world-making beyond the classificatory apparatus. It describes agency under constraint, extending Coulthard’s critique into a non-settler setting where refusal would forgo material protections (Coulthard, 2014), and supplementing Simpson’s resurgence by accounting for engagements Indian communities cannot abandon (Simpson, 2017). With Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000; 2011), the paradox also limits the substantive freedoms a self-determined life requires.

Adivasi communities in Assam—Munda, Santal, Oraon, Kurmi, Gond, Bhumij, and related groups—make this concrete. Their record shows layered illegibility, subjectification as labour and compelled translation, the labour archive as proof of absence, and world-making that does not wait for the list. Assam’s tea is the product of labourers’ cumulative toil (Das, 1999). Communities who built a major export industry through structured unfreedom remain denied recognition extended to others.

Being Adivasi means ancestral names against the “tea tribe” label; Sarna practice and Mundari, Sadri, and Ho languages; forced movement refused as voluntary migration; and Assam lived as home while the Scheduled Tribe name remains in the state of origin. Being Scheduled Tribe means constitutional confirmation—reservations, representation, safeguards—available elsewhere and withheld here. Certificates that do not travel, labour lines without title, wages keyed to a labour category, election-time promises, and a homestead patta that does not open the list shape how identity is known. That knowledge is gendered: women meet the mandate in the plucking line, in a wage coded as supplementary, and in land and status running through male registration.

Meaningful recognition cannot be administrative inclusion alone. It must rest on self-identification, territorial redress, community governance beyond plantation and party machinery, capability restoration, and gender justice. It must also rest on world-making. These communities are not waiting for the state. They are building futures in the Sarna grove, the organisation, the language, the Mela, the oral archive, and the writ. A recognition system adequate to its purposes would honour what has been built and remove the barriers between that life and its constitutional name.

 

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C.J Sonowal is Retd. Faculty, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India and Ms Paavana Barman is PhD Scholar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai-400088

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