ABSTRACT
One summer afternoon, as I waited in the Jagdalpur Collectorate for an appointment with the collector, the local head of the bureaucracy in Bastar, a large tribal district in Central India, I witnessed the following exchange. Some mail had just arrived and the superintendent picked up one letter and read it aloud. It was a parliamentary question about what was being done about the rights of indigenous people in Bastar. ‘Indian genius?’ he wondered aloud. Then, after much discussion with the other clerks, the superintendent checked the word in the dictionary, and finding that it meant swadeshi or native, they decided that since adivasis were no less native than anyone else but also no more, the question was just not applicable to Bastar.
