ABSTRACT
In 2001 a movement that became known as the ‘Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha’ grabbed headlines in Kerala for staging a successful demonstration in front of the Secretariat to protest against the deaths by starvation that had occurred in adivasi colonies. In Kerala, the rise of indigenism is mostly related to declining possibilities of social integration. In Kerala, of particular influence was the National Front for Tribal Self-Rule, from which a more regional organisation, the South Zone Adivasi Forum, evolved in the process of organising a large ‘Adivasi Sangham’ in 1992 to protest against the colonisation of indigenous people on the day that Latin America officially celebrates its ‘discovery’ by Columbus. An eco-indigenist reading, appeals to bourgeois imaginations of the noble savage, but also has some popularity amongst adivasis themselves for holding up a previously despised ‘simple’ lifestyle as a model for the world.
