ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the issue of the rights of indigenous populations over natural resources in their territories, and the manner in which the defense of these rights has been formulated in political practice. It discusses the struggle of the adivasi peasantry for the forests in Jharkhand in the state of Bihar. A people's consciousness of long permanence in a given territory with specific social and historical meanings, translated into a sense of belonging to a place, is usually one of the terrains in which collective identity is formulated and reformulated over the course of time. The process of dispossession has been aided by legitimating ideologies that, phrased in racial or ethnic terms, support existing patterns of political domination and unequal socio-economic relationships. The adivasis used to reclaim land from the forest for agricultural purposes, and had customary rights over the collection of forest products.
