ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the translation – the transformation in performance – of the U.N.’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9th August) into World Adivasi Day (Vishwa Adivasi Divas or Din in Gujarat, specifically in the town of Chhotaudepur in eastern central Gujarat. Although an imagined global adivasi (‘indigenous’) community is integral to this celebration, its principal effect is to address more local issues of contested identity, particularly for (relatively) young, literate males, and in Chhotaudepur for males of the dominant adivasi community, known as Rathvas. While not concerned with sovereignty in the narrowest sense of the word, these issues largely arise as a result of external state action: the refusal of the central government to acknowledge adivasis as indigenous when ratifying UNDRIP; recent attempts by the state government to appropriate celebrations of World Adivasi Day for partisan purposes; and ongoing legal challenges to the status of Rathvas as constituting a ‘Scheduled Tribe’. To address these issues, fractures within the community have required not indigenous religionising but a deliberate ‘de-religionising’ of adivasi religious traditions in order to operationalise them.
