ABSTRACT
The adivasi emerged in twentieth-century India as a powerful political imaginary. This is a uniquely ‘modern’ phenomenon of our time and place, by which peoples categorised as primitive/originary become the critical clue to enunciating contemporary politics vis-à-vis nation and capital. In this essay, I shall try to show how peoples known as adivasi or ‘tribes’ have, through changing political paradigms from the nineteenth century onwards, assumed the radical role of a modern political agent in India. At another level, I shall demonstrate the inability of our historical and political imagination to adequately thematise this apparently paradoxical phenomenon of the ‘primitive’ reappearing in modernity as a special and critical case of the transformative moment.2
