Workshop | Indigeneity and Its Many Lives in South Asia

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Mabel Denzin Gergan from Vanderbilt University.

Indigeneity and decolonization are politically charged terms in South Asia. The Indian state rejects Indigeneity as a category, even as Adivasi and other tribal communities claim it to contest dispossession while Hindu nationalists in India and the diaspora invoke both terms to cast majoritarian politics as anti-colonial resistance.

This workshop takes up these tensions through a pre-circulated short essay, “Indigeneity and Its Many Lives: Hindutva’s Cooptation and Indigenous Assertions in India,” to ask why Indigenous struggles remain marginal to South Asian studies.

Together, we will consider what it means to trace continuities and ruptures between settler colonial and so-called postcolonial contexts, and what commitments follow for fieldwork, writing and teaching when Indigeneity is taken seriously as both a contested political claim and a relational tie to land. Participants are asked to read the essay in advance.

Mabel Denzin Gergan is assistant professor of Asian studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity and race. Her research and teaching are grounded in the Indian Himalayan region and attend to the racial and colonial logics underlying Indigenous communities’ disproportionate exposure to environmental risk and vulnerability.