Contested Modernities in the Tribal Zone: The Post-Colonial State, Adivasi Politics* and the Making of Local Modernity

in the Northern Nilgiris (South India)

Ulrich Demmer
Institut fr Ethnologie und Afrikanistik, Oettingenstr. 67, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt, D-80538 Mnchen Abstract. In the northern Nilgiris of South India the post-colonial state, local Adivasi communities and imaginations of modernity constitute a dynamic field of often tense but also creative relationships. Rather than an arid dichotomy of tradition and modernity we are dealing here with a specific form of an alternative or local modernity. This paper analyses how this particular modernity is constructed through a broad spectrum of activities ranging from dominance and cultural hegemony to cohabitation down to everyday and cultural resistance. Moreover, this field is constituted through cultural processes of imagination, everyday practices and performances in secular as well as in religious/shamanic contexts. Seen together these practices present the domain of public culture as a zone of debate and as a contested terrain. In particular this essay explores how actors use these everyday practices and political/religious performances to imagine or/and contest particular notions of modernity, statehood and sociality and how these relate to one another in short, how complex agencies constitute local modernity in a field of what Ortner (1995:176) has called political and cultural authenticity. [postcolonial anthropology, statehood, indigenous politics, performance and social imagination, South Asia]

Introduction: Local Modernities and Political Authenticity

The study of local forms of modernity has gained a firm place in recent political and cultural anthropology. While earlier work was primarily based on a paradigm that conceived the relationship between tradition and modernity per se in antagonistic terms, with modernity understood in the European-Western sense (cf. Taylor 1999) as a singular phenomenon and basically as a process of overcoming traditional societies and
* The term Adivasi denotes social groups being classified by governmental institutions (e.g. in census data) as tribal groups. In recent debates on the representation of culture(s) in India (cf. Heidemann 2004), the latter term can easily provoke notions of anthropological primitivism, exotism, or even orientalist imagination. The term Adivasi (ancient people), being today often used by the people themselves, points in contrast to the political and cultural participation and empowerment of those groups in contemporary India. In this article therefore I prefer the term Adivasi but keeping the above comments in mind I also speak of indigenous and tribal people.
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cultures, today we conceive of modernity in the plural: we explore alternative modernities (Appadurai 1996:192), other modernities (Rofel 1999), global modernities (Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995), Melanesian modernities (Friedman and Carrier 1996) and others still. Despite the apparent diversity of these approaches they all share the insight that in the wake of modernity indigenous socio-cultural formations were not simply washed away by a tide of modernization (Taylor 1999). Instead, indigenous people often play an active role in shaping and transforming the process with the result that specific local forms of modernity arise. The growing awareness of this process is informed by a number of trajectories in anthropology, sociology and political science. The rapid increase of globalization and of transnational phenomena (see Appadurai 1996; Hauser-Schublin/Braukmper 2002) question the dominance and persuasive power of a modernity solely understood in Western terms: post-colonial and subaltern studies (Chatterjee 1986) reclaim, in accordance with a reflexive and globally-oriented political anthropology (Ortner 1995, Friedman 2003), the acknowledgment of the many forms of agency employed by local communities or cultures. And last but not least continental social philosophy too, in the wake of its critical engagement with modernity (Gaonkar 1999), made its impact felt. Taken altogether, such scholarship led to a provincializing of Europe (Chakrabarty 2000) and of its vision of modernity strengthening the insight that modernity always unfolds within a specific cultural and civilizational context, and different starting points for the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes (Gaonkar 1999:15). At the same time tradition and modernity are no longer located (and evaluated) on a time axis or on a ladder of development but understood in spatial and dynamic terms operating in sites where various communities, institutions and actors are entangled in interactions and political engagements. Thus a spatial paradigm displaced an evolutionary one and brings into view the manifold cultural and political processes which are at work in the interfaces of local, national and global impacts (see Heidemann 2006; King 1991). Finally, locality is no longer conceived as the stronghold of tradition in the sense of an enclosed and timeless culture but realized as an active force in the dynamic processes of global, national and local engagements. Beyond these shared assumptions, however, substantial differences exist with respect to the relevance and power of the multiple agencies involved. Some authors tend implicitly to see the global flows of meanings, media, events and other migrational movements as the most powerful forces. To be sure, this position does regard local or vernacular actors as actively taking part in the processes of shaping alternative modernities. Appadurai insists, for example, that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agency (1996:7). At the same time, however, local social life is conceptualized in a rather reductionist way. It is best conceived of as a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) rather than an arena for conscious choice, justification and representation (ibid.:44). Moreover, without the impact of external media and their visions it is simply powered by the givenness of things (ibid.:55) while practices of imagination were residual (ibid.:53).

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Indeed, as Sahlins (1999) has pointed out, the concept of local cultural forms proposed in that type of theory does suggest that without their experiencing colonial others and their cultural formations (e. g. cricket), modernization and, most of all, globalization, indigenous communities are unable (and also feel no need) to create cultural images empowering them to shape their social life in terms of a conscious project.1 In other words, people in that domain are implicitly seen as lacking the capability jointly to generate ideas of their own about what makes for a valuable and proper life how they want to live in a good way and what they regard as wrong or bad. This tendency theoretically to underestimate the projective and imaginative agencies of local cultural communities makes it very difficult for the ethnographer to fully take them into account. The power of vernacular or local actors and groups actively to co-construct emerging modernities is thus (paradoxically against the theories initial insistence on local agencies) not given appropriate weight.2 Another perspective stresses the coexistence of global/national and vernacular/local imaginations and concepts. Thus Gupta (1998) analyzes traditional and modern ideas of farmers in Punjab (India). Both, however, provide valuable resources which exist side-by-side. In everyday practice they are employed according to circumstances, thus constituting a kind of hybrid modernity. Mankekar (2000), too, describes the consumption of televisual media in Delhi as a kind of hybrid reality, where modern and traditional interpretations and schemes of understanding are simultaneously available, though without being merged into a new cultural formation. Finally, a third position conceptualizes local modernities as a dynamic process where both sides indigenous and modern agencies/actors are actively involved in giving shape to new cultural configurations. Chakrabarty (1999), for example, shows that the formation of a cultural and literary public sphere in Calcutta that began in the colonial period was significantly shaped by a Bengali tradition of public conversational discourse (adda) that existed long before colonialism. Likewise the modernity of witchcraft and the
1

Public culture is explicitly conceptualized as a domain where a number of collective and individual agents are engaged in the contested construction of modernity except local ones. Thus the producers of global and national media are the central lites of these societies the artists, bureaucrats, ideologues, media experts who are central to this culture-making (Appadurai/Breckenridge 1988:7-8). The middle-class is also seen as the social basis of public culture formations (Appadurai/Breckenridge 1996:7) while private entrepreneurs and commercial institutions (ibid.:7) are as much involved as is the state (ibid.:8). Friedman (1995) offers a detailed theoretical discussion of that stance. There is no space here to consider in further detail the many aspects relevant to a socio-cultural theory that can take appropriate account of the complex agencies (local, national and global ones) at work. 2 To quote just one passage suggesting this: Few students of global modernities would deny that the media (in particular the electronic media) have transformed the meaning of locality by creating complex images of distance, self, other, and social transformation that extend (my own italics) to the remotest societies of the world the capability to construct imagined worlds (Appadurai/Breckenridge 1996:15). Note that what are extended here are not only the new images but the very capability to construct imagined worlds.

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politics of the belly, which according to Geschiere (1997), Bayart (1993) and Mbembe (2001) characterize the political culture in Cameroon, are another example where indigenous concepts play a fundamental role in the formation of local modernities. Indeed, as Friedman (1995) rightly points out, the force of indigenous cultural attributions and imaginations can be so strong that modern or global meanings and artifacts are either merely integrated into existing practices or they may even provoke criticism and/or resistance of national/global projects of modernity; the studies of Scott (1985), Ortner (1997), T. Turner (1992) or Werbner/Ranger (1996) provide ample testimony to those processes. Against this later background, then, local modernities appear less as a harmonious coexistence or a hybrid combination of cultural imaginations and concepts than as a process of negotiations and confrontations or, to take Appadurai and Breckenridges (1988:6 7) terms, as a contested terrain and a zone of debate (cf. also Spittler 2002). Moreover, local modernities are constructed through various culturally-specific understandings of person, nature, culture, reason and the good to such an extent that, as Gaonkar (1999:15) points out, it is indispensable to study in detail how actors dynamically employ these cultural concepts in specific sites and localities. At the same time it is necessary to include in our analysis in more subtle ways the political usages people make of indigenous concepts both in everyday life and in performative contexts, in order to offer, as Sherry Ortner (1995:176) expresses it, a thick description of the political and cultural authenticity3 of post-colonial and global sites of cultural interaction; Political authenticity implies taking into account the internal complexity of subaltern politics and culture (ibid.:183) and since they have an authentic, not merely reactive, politics, so they must be seen as having an authentic, and not merely reactive, culture . . . a certain prior and ongoing . . . own sense of order, justice, meaning, and the like (ibid.:180). Last but not least, I will also fully agree with her that all this is to be seen as an outcome of human agency, understood as the capacity of social beings to interpret and morally evaluate their situation and to formulate projects and try to enact them (ibid.:185). The present article takes up these ideas and examines the formation of local modernity in the northern Nilgiri hills of South India. On the one hand it analyses how modernity is represented in public performances and in locally-specific ways by the Indian nation-state as well as by the then ruling party of Tamil Nadu, one of the several regional states constituting India today. On the other hand, it explores how Adivasi communu Kurumba, acting in a complex political field renities, in particular Sholega and Je spond to, engage with and also transform these representations and practices.
3 Of course, authenticity is, as Ortner makes clear, a highly problematized term, insofar as it seems to presume a naive belief in cultural purity, in untouched cultures whose histories are uncontaminated by those of their neighbors or of the west. I make no such presumptions; nonetheless, there must be a way to talk about what the Comaroffs call the endogenous historicity of local worlds (1992:27), in which the pieces of reality, however much borrowed from or imposed by others, are woven together through the logic of a groups own locally and historically evolved bricolage. It is this that I will mean by authenticity (1995:176).

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The Region
The northern Nilgiri region is still a richly-forested plateau at the northern edge of the Nilgiri hills in south India, where a number of different indigenous cultural communities, nu Kurumba (cf. Demmer 1996) or Adivasi, like Irula, Sholega, Betta Kurumba and Je live. Until the 1940s this was a densely-forested area with a mainly tribal population. Though there were a few farming and cattle-breeding families,4 some merchants and also a few families of plantation labourers, it was primarily the state and its institutions that played a central role here. Already in colonial times, for example, the British administration had parts of the forests declared as state-protected reserved forest areas and also promoted tea and coffee plantations. After Indias independence in the 1950s state interventions increased: the Indian nation-state as well as the regional state of Tamil Nadu converted more and more of the forest into reserved areas and, most important for local Adivasi people, into protected wildlife territories where settlements of tribal people became illegal. They also built a hydro-electric power plant and today they promote wildlife tourism as well as a new generation of ecological and environmentally-friendly hydro-electric power projects. In addition, various steps were undertaken to modernize the tribal population in the sectors of economy, education and health. Among those measures was the construction of tribal colonies for the Adivasi communities at the periphery of the forest areas meant to bring them out of the forest nu Kurumba, lived until the 1970s mainly and settle the tribal people who, like the Je inside the forest areas (Demmer 1996). Other measures were the installation of mobile health services, tribal schools and cooperative societies (LAMP Societies) that were to guarantee fixed and just prices for the forest products gathered by the tribal people and then sold to the LAMP. Last but not least, in recent years Adivasi groups have become the subject of various NGOs seeking to promote and to implement their own visions of modernity, humanity and ecological development.

The State, Imagination of Modernity and Gouvernementality

After independence India advanced, as a nation, as a state and through its post-colonial elites, a primarily a-cultural (Taylor 1999) vision of modernity. In principle this is conceived as a non-negotiable but universally inescapable movement simply awaiting its unfolding in the so-called backward areas and backward minds of people, both of which were seen as being blocked and imprisoned by traditional values. Other aspects motivating this political stance were a concern with an allegedly value-neutral and procedural model of society, a western concept of the person, foregrounding vir4

Hockings (1989) provides key data on the demographic history of the region.

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tues like autonomy and individuality, notions of rationality rooted in the European tradition of enlightenment, the primacy of a secular state and the compartmentalization of spirituality in the private sphere of citizens. This idea went hand in hand with the impersonal authority of the state and the function of its institutions as the only sites where justice and rights, education, health, security, etc. are to be secured and which, at the same time, implemented this vision of modernity through the various practices of gouvernementality (Foucault 1991). In practice gouvernementality implies a spectrum of strategies encompassing disciplinization, ruling and habitualization (Bourdieu 1999) which aim, mediated by the state, to root modernity as an idea and as a way of life in the mind, the body and in the very interactions of the population. As anthropological and social historical studies show, in India too this epistemic idea of state and modernity began and continues to be written into the bodies, the social hygiene and into the mind and habitus of the people (Arnold 1993; Gupta 2001). This is particularly the case in the northern Nilgiri region with its many Adivasi groups conceived and classified by the state per se as a backward segment of the population and in need of encompassing development: with respect to their cognitive-intellectual abilities, to indigenous health and hygiene concepts, to economic practices and with respect to political consciousness as citizens of the nation as well. Accordingly, the presence of national institutions in the region is extensive and covers all fields of modernization referred to above. Accordingly, the strategies of gouvernementality and habitualization used by the various institutions of state and nation to inscribe their meanings in the bodies and the minds of people permeate many domains of everyday life. The goals of modern education such as discipline and hygiene, for example, are mediated in tribal schools and inscribed into the pupils bodies through habitual drill and command. In government hospitals, too, tribals have to learn, it is said, rigorous discipline and training in hygiene. The idea of India as a nation-state encompassing all cultural and local diversities is likewise explicitly learned but also performed in the wake of routines and thus embodied in public schools: the public rapport being exercised every morning in the schoolyard, for example, consists of the singing of the national anthem, and on Independence Day the yard itself becomes an India in miniature, as the federal regional states (Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Punjab, etc.) are symbolically represented by pupils dressed in what is perceived as the typical regional dress. Other forms of habitualization refer directly to the idea of the powerful state and serve to embody the proper behaviour that is expected vis--vis the bureaucracy or the police. Of great importance in this respect are the proper and subtle ways of conduct to be employed in the interaction with agents of the state: appropriate ways of greeting, of standing/sitting, of speaking with a quiet voice and lowered head, of having a cup of tea, and so forth. Accordingly, the manifold strategies of stately habitualization concern a substantial part of the everyday life of tribal people in the region.

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Performing the Modernity of the State

Apart from the micro-practices of gouvernementality and habitualization which mediate the culture of modernity in a rather implicit way there are also explicit procedures employed by the state. They too are meant to lend its ideas of modernity and a good life a hegemonic force that makes them extend into and root in the population as far as possible. Political performances are a privileged way to accomplish that (Breckenridge/Appadurai 1996; Brow 1988; Schein 1999).5 These performative frameworks constitute fields of collective action where meanings are represented and/or performed in an expressive and explicit way. On the other hand, they also have a pragmatic dimension and in particular their rhetorical function is of great importance in the struggle to strive for a hegemony of gouvernemental ideas. Thus performances often aim to persuade the participants to accept or to consent to the meanings expressed and thus to expand their hegemonic reach as far as possible into the population and/or the Adivasi. This is of utmost importance for the state whose institutions often like to represent themselves in public ceremonies and events (cf. Tenekoon 1988; Kertzer 1988). In the northern Nilgiris there are numerous performances with this intention, and annual ceremonies like the annual meetings of national cooperative societies and fair-price stores particularly seek to draw public attention. Celebrating the establishment of institutions that are meant to develop the people, politicians, civil servants and a few members of tribal communities appear on the stage, speeches are given and symbolic actions (greetings, distribution of grants or loans, flag hosting, etc.) are carried out. At the same time specific aspects of the power and value of the federal state, of modernity and of progress are made explicit that way but locally-rooted meanings, for example Tamilian notions of a protective and promoting state (see below), are articulated as well. Occasionally, those performances are also arranged in such a way that they attribute a special position to the tribal population within the state and the nation. This staging of ethnic participation is often meant to represent the cultural diversity of Tamil Nadu as a positive factor (with the participating tribal representatives usually being exoticized and traditionalized) or it simply serves to display the assumed gratitude of tribal people for the benefits that came with state interventions. In this respect the performances thus aim to legitimize state strategies of modernization and development. Beyond that, as in other parts of India too, there are numerous smaller opportunities to stage celebrations of the state and modernity such as openings of Government institutions (e. g. hospitals, ration-shops), Independence Day, Gandhis birthday and other national events. Since, however, the Nilgiris are a rather thinly-populated hill area with only a
5

Forms of public culture like theatre, film, sport etc. can serve that purpose too (cf. Appadurai/ Breckenridge 1988, 1996).

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small number of voters, and thus not constituting a central field for party politics, performances on a larger scale, for example, those with top-level politicians and other famous public figures (film actors, for example) as performers, are rather rare. Yet in November 2005 the local population experienced an extraordinary spectacle of political performance. In that month and after more than 10 years of construction a technically very ambitious hydro-electric power plant, situated in the middle of the protected state forest areas and supposed to deliver electric power to the highly energy-intensive industrial region of Coimbatore, was completed. For the inauguration and start-up of this state-run prestigious development project the then Prime Minister Jayalalitha and a number of other high-ranking cabinet members had announced their participation and, in addition, the Prime Minister had arranged for a sophisticated simultaneous multimedia presentation of the event. Employing a range of performative means this multi-media performance displayed the governments specific understandings of modernity and the role of the state. One of the important aspects was the display of the power of the state and of the governing party to the population. Already in the run-up to the opening substantial and normally unattainable resources of the state (construction machines, bitumen, workers, etc.) were mobilized in a very short time and within days a helicopter landing-pad and, to the surprise of the audience, an ultramodern media-landscape were erected at the periphery of the village constituting an impressive political arena. Of course the ruling party did not fail to arrange the transport (including free bus rides and free lunches) of a mass of spectators from the whole region. When the large audience had finally been security-checked and assembled in the stadium-like media arena, and after some hours of tense expectancy, the Prime Minister flew in with a helicopter. Yet to the disappointment of the audience she was immediately separated from the excited population in an even more dramatic and impressive enactment of state power. Surrounded by her security troops, the so-called black cats (dressed in black and heavily-armoured), and by security forces who were seen continuously talking on walkie-talkies and mobile phones, she left the helicopter, performed an offering to a Hindu goddess (Laksmi) in the company of Brahman priests (brought in from faraway Kerala), then quickly entered a luxurious jeep with blackened windows and speedily disappeared, accompanied by an armada of other VIPs being rushed away in a convoy of cars and jeeps. This somehow unreal striking appearance and disappearance of powerful people certainly enhanced the demonstration of the states power, underlined its unpredictability and inaccessibility and left the crowd impressed but also silenced. In fact it was very quiet for a while after she left, a silence, it seemed, that echoed the audiences experience of being sidelined and reduced to the role of a silent and at best applauding population. Moreover, many of the people I talked to later on compared the event with political performances staged by G. W. Bush or the Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Ghandi, both of whom they saw in television news being broadcast by satellite into their village and tribal homes: G. W. Bush and R. Ghandi, people remarked, only they have black cats no? They dont come close to people, you know,

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never shake hands, remember? Those were ambivalent statements, however, combining a sense of respect with feelings of fear and disempowerment. Most people were explicit, though, about their dislike of the distance and separation that this event established between the people and those in power. Others drew parallels with the performances of the military in contemporary Iraq which they had come to know as most other people in the world today through watching the daily television news. A second aspect of modernity displayed by means of performance was the visual medium itself. A huge mobile TV screen, such as the ones used in European large-scale sport or political events, was brought to the village site from faraway Chennai (as the advertisement spots shown before and after the broadcast made clear). Along with a number of large-size TV (LCD) screens that were set up at the outer circle of the arena it was used to broadcast live the inauguration and the opening that Prime Minister Jayalalitha and other important politicians performed in the main building of the hydroelectric power plant. This plant, however, was situated only a few kilometers away from the arena in the forest and jungle area but at that time it was completely cordoned-off from onlookers and the public. Instead, and as if to underline the hypermodern vision of the present government, this broadcast was transmitted via satellite from the power plant to the nearby media arena where the assembled village/tribal population could watch this performance of modernity simultaneously on the big mobile screen and on the large size TV-sets. Indeed it is hard to imagine a more suitable arrangement for the accomplishment of the rhetorical function of this act, namely to convince the audience of the state-of-the-art modernity of this government. Moreover, and as if to underline that intention, this media-landscape also served as an arena where the national imagination of that modernity, as seen by the ruling party at that time (Jaya ADMK), was explicitly displayed and represented on the screens. In a central sequence of the whole political performance, when the transmission of the inauguration ceremony was finished, all screens began to show a film of about 10 minutes length that was produced, as it turned out, by the ruling party. That clip narrated vital aspects of the life history of a modern suburban Tamil family and evaluated its way of life. The main plots of this movie foregrounded the conjugal modern family (father, mother and children), a suburban modern way of life and modern education as positive values in contrast with the probably attractive but unfortunately no longer appropriate way of traditional village life. In a final sequence, moreover, the film dramatically showed the outstanding value of the Tamil mother (cf. Rsel 1997) as key protector of the modern family and ended with a scene where this mother was cinetechnically doubled and shown to be identical with the female prime minister Jayalalitha herself: in this representation two figures, the Tamil mother and the display of the Prime Minister as the political warrant of modernity, were merged into one and the same person, the Prime Minister Jayalalitha herself. Last but not least, the political performance also served to represent the social position of the tribal population, namely as a marginal sector of society. Members of various Adivasi communities were indeed present but only as spectators of the perfor-

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mance and nowhere did tribal groups play an active part, contrary to the announcements of the programs that were circulated early on in the villages and among the audience. The message of their visible absence was clear: Adivasi are valuable members of modern society but only as consumers and as the subject of political modernity and not as constitutive actors of that modernity. In sum, then, the entire political event employs a variety of performative means that articulate and put into perspective the ruling partys as well as the governments specific understanding of modernity and the power of the modern state.

Adivasi Infrapolitics
The culture of modernity outlined above constitutes a substantial part of Adivasi everyday experience in the region. It is not only displayed for an audience in political performances of various scale but mediated by institutions of the state and embodied in the practices of gouvernementality. Accordingly, tribal people are faced with it in almost all of their practices as well: when they turn to the local government hospital for help, when their children visit the tribal school, when they are arrested by the local police and so forth. Adivasi are, however, no passive recipients of modernity: both its concepts and its practices are actively interpreted, taken up and put under scrutiny in Adivasi discourses and praxis. In fact, here as elsewhere (cf. Ortner 1995, Geschiere 1997) tribal people respond in many ways to the claims of modernity and to the hegemonic efforts of the state. One set of strategies consists of making active use of its institutions and of cohabitation. This becomes particularly evident when Adivasi respond affirmatively to the policy of modernization. Government jobs, for example, a certain percentage of which are reserved for educated members of communities classified as scheduled tribes, are welcomed by those Adivasi who fulfill the requirements (e. g. a school degree). Under certain conditions medical services offered by the government hospital are called on as nu Kurumba people make use of it to treat minor cases well. Thus the Sholega and Je (headache, mild fever and so on), though always with a substantial measure of watchfulness regarding corruption and medical output. Whenever serious cases are on the agenda, however, one trusts to the Adivasi healing rituals (Demmer 2007) or even private physicians. Though the latter have to be paid for their service they can at least be held responsible for what they do. Some Adivasi even turn to Ayurvedic hospitals in the Federal State of Kerala which, though they require a very strenuous and long bus ride, are renowned not only for their orthopedic expertise but also for their fair treatment of Adivasi patients. Last but not least, outright cohabitative practices are frequent nu Kurumba, for example, must carry a license issued by the as well. Sholega and Je local forest department to collect and sell forest products. Yet they often manage to do without it and practice a kind of silent cohabitation with forest rangers who likewise draw financial benefits from this strategy.

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While these instances show that Adivasi in the region are not totally victimized but actively engaged in making use of the state many other practices disclose a salient attitude of resistance. They consist of two forms, namely everyday resistance or infrapolitics, as James Scott (1985) has termed it, and what Barry Morris (1989) has called cultural resistance. nu Kurumba (cf. also Demmer 1996) The infrapolitical everyday resistance of Je and Sholega consists particularly of such strategies as labour-boycott, stealing of food, sabotage, cunning and displays of ignorance. Gossip and slander too are significant methods. The Tamil Nadu government, for example, established a number of tribal settlements in the region but the huts, built by local constructors in a corrupt setting, seldom correspond with public standards or with the needs of the tribal population. During monsoon, for instance, many of them leak because they are built with bad quality materials and in the hot season they are extremely hot inside, owing to the nu Kurumba metal or asbestos roofs on top. One of the consequences is that some Je simply do not use them in the way expected of them. Rather than living in the huts they rent them out to other tribal or caste people. In tribal schools, too, the state implements ideas which simply contradict Adivasi practices and concepts. According to the implicit principles of those schools education still rests upon the unquestioned authority of teachers and the subordination of pupils, including the latters acceptance of bodily punishment and violence. This, however, is a habit that is totally foreign to Adivasi practices and concepts and is resisted outright. As a result and with the unsponu Kurumba children simply dont go to school at ken support of their parents most Je all or they are absent for longer periods of time because, as they say, they are treated badly, beaten and scolded (cf. Demmer 1996). When I asked their parents why they didnt intervene and make the children go they simply said the same, namely that their children are beaten and shouted at in school. How, they asked me, can they make their children go there? Similar weapons of the weak are employed to respond to efforts of the state to nu Kurumba out of the forest. Thus farm land was distributed by the keep the Je government in order to settle them but soon many families leased their land out to other castes. Sometimes, to give another example, the forest department also restricts nu Kurumba say. the gathering of forest products and locks the forest, as the Je This idea is based on the policy of wildlife conservation and of protecting the ecological environment but cuts across the very economic base of the Adivasi who depend on the gathering and sale of forest products (cf. Demmer ibid.). Accordingly, the nu Kurumba respond with a range of practices that allow them at least a certain Je amount of access to the forest regions and thus to some monetary income. Though the details cant be disclosed here suffice to say that the ideas implicit in this forest and environment policy are formulated in a totally one-sided manner in favour of the interests of the state, and even the whole world, since at present the region is declared as the Nilgiri ecosphere and a world-heritage (cf. Keystone Foundation 2007).

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nu Kurumba, for example, use it to esLabour-boycott is employed as well. The Je cape the often excessive demands of the LAMP-cooperative societys management to increase the production of minor forest products and accordingly the amount of work. Instead of increasing their workload they simply remain in the forest, thus staying out of the managers reach and control. Avoidance thus appears as a major strategy of dealing with outside pressures. This technique is also used to resist the states gouvernementality. nu KurumThus, medical inoculation teams often fail owing to the fact that the Je ba withdraw into the forest when they notice medical teams arrive in jeeps. Officers from the census departments suffer the same fate when they swarm out to collect census data about the population but often find themselves in empty settlements because the Adivasi have disappeared. In other cases the cunning of disguise is used. Many nu Kurumba, for example, say they dont speak or understand the official language Je (Tamil) when it comes to their being questioned or interrogated by state officers and employees. Pretending not to understand the questions they simply act in a way that helps them to avoid entering the states records. As a result officers often find themselves in the midst of eloquent silence and leave with empty hands.6 nu Kurumba pracRobbery, too, is a frequent expression of infrapolitics and the Je tice it in striking ways. I have mentioned already that the Adivasi people are frequently forbidden to enter the forest areas and to collect forest products. Since those periods can extend over several months their income is severely reduced and many cant afford to buy sufficient food items in the market. One of the solutions of the young people then is to help themselves and raid, for example, the state-run chicken farm that was established in the 1970s to improve local nutrition levels through the production and nu Kurumba youth have expert knowledge of climbsale of eggs and chickens. The Je ing as well as of the behaviour of animals and, in times of severe shortages, they use these skills to provide their kin people with chicken and eggs for free. During the night, as I recall, they used to climb on the rooftop of the farm, sprinkle water over the chickens in the cages below and thus make the chickens keep quiet because they take the water for rain, fold their wings close to their body and sit down quietly. As excellent climbers the youths then entered the cages from above, took some chickens

6 It should be mentioned that my own fieldwork (in total more than seven years between 1987 and 2007) as well as the ethnographic field-studies conducted by Indian colleagues, was initially seriously undermined by these strategies of avoidance and silence as well. Since I have described my own encounters in detail elsewhere (Demmer 1996) it suffices to recall here the really frustrated group of anthropology students complaining about the stubborn silence and the seemingly complete ignornu Kurumba and about what they interpreted as the typical shyness of those simple triance of the Je nu Kurumba during a few weeks of fieldwork bal people when they tried to interview some of the Je for their thesis. Without long-term field research my work would not have been possible. I wish to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as well as the Indian Government for the generous funding of my research.

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and disappeared into the dark. Even the watchmen posted there at night didnt notice anything. The following morning they were surprised, of course, and unable to explain it they constructed rumors about the magic of tribal people and how they are able to li) and steal chicktransform themselves, enter locked cages in the guise of spirits (ga ens without being noticed. Those rumors spread into the village and lend a frightening or at least an ambivalent image of the Adivasi as being not only backward but also powerful in their own way. The young Adivasi members of the raiding gangs are very well aware of this effect and they are proud of their reputation as mysterious, dangerous and powerful forestpeople. I remember well when we sat together after a successful raid and the young guys narrated their adventures and heroic deeds during the night: how they are able to fool the watchmen, how they use their forest knowledge and how they manage to secure good food for their people whenever they need to. They thus underlined their autonomy as well as their power to take care of themselves, despite suppression and injustice. Moreover, these raids become modest hero-stories when they are told later on at the cooking-fires at night and where they are accompanied by laughter and scornful comments about the stupidity of watchmen or other state employees. At the same time the youngsters are proud of their skills and of the sophisticated use of their forest knowledge a knowledge that village people are unable to attain. This experience certainly contributes to the increase of self-respect of the Adivasi in a significant manner. nu KuStrategies of sabotage are also used. Thus, for example, forest officers need Je rumba trackers to find their way whenever they move in the thick forest areas yet sometimes it happens that they are left alone on various pretexts or even without any prior notice at all. Since the forest officers are usually not acquainted well enough with the local forest environment, however, they are literally at the mercy of the jungle and in particular of its numerous wild and dangerous animals like elephants, bears or gaurs. This experience contributes substantially to enhancing their respect for the Adivasi. Cunning and disguise belong, as already suggested above with respect to the states census inquiries, to the spectrum of Adivasi infrapolitics too. During elections on the state level, for example, it is not uncommon for Adivasi to take money not only from supporters of one candidate but from several campaigning parties. In return they promise to vote for the respective candidate. On election day, however, they simply fill in the sheet in such a way that they produce an invalid ballot. When asked later on why they didnt vote as expected they pretend that they didnt know how to do that correctly. Moreover, they also take care that this message is circulated in the village and thus it happens that a kind of fake public knowledge is constructed according to which nu Kurumba dont even know how to vote. Other strategies of Adivasi infrapothe Je litics consist of the dispersion of rumors, gossip and the production of bad reputations. Thus stories and rumors about the dangers of the forest (wild animals, demons) are propagated in the offices and tea-stalls of the region. On the one hand, these narratives nu Kurumba and thus preserve and enunderscore the courage and expertise of the Je

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large the symbolic capital of the Adivasi. On the other hand, they serve a practical purpose and contribute to keeping non-tribal people away from the forest, from the forest products and thus from the primary sources of Adivasi monetary income (cf. Demmer 1996). In addition, the narratives exaggerate and dramatize the dangers of the forest or of actual incidents and this serves to underline the competence of Adivasi with respect to forest matters. Moreover, anecdotes and stories are passed on and spread, suggesting the cowardice of forest officers when they move in the forest or their corruptive and unfair conduct. The goal of this politics of reputation, as Bailey (1963) has called it, is, of course, to weaken the public face of the people concerned, since reputation is still a substantial source of status within the politics of the local village community.

Adivasi Politics and the Tribal View

As Scott (1985) has shown, everyday politics of subaltern groups vis--vis dominant institutions like the state and its agencies is not confined to infrapolitical strategies but also draws on resources of shared social meanings and a cultural background. In the Malaysian region where he worked, for example, everyday politics rested on a particular horizon, on what he called the village view. In Scotts reading this is a corpus of value orientations, meanings and codes for conduct represented in folklore as well as in rituals and providing a resource actors can draw upon in order to act politically. Moreover, it also constitutes the cultural basis for criticism and interventions. Likewise with respect to the Adivasi here we can speak of what one might call a Tribal View. As a specific configuration of moral and socio-cultural knowledge it is articulated in narratives, songs (cf. Demmer 1996) and ritual performances. In the same way as gouvernementality is a political practice based on the imagined culture of modernity so the everyday infrapolitics of the Adivasi people too is based on moral and cultural conceptualizations. And as we saw in the case of the state so among the Adivasi sociocultural ideas and concepts are most effectively expressed in performative contexts. In fact, for many local cultures performances provide a forum for the negotiation of modernity and nationhood. As the studies of Jean and John Comaroff (1993, 1994) and others (cf. Roseman 1996; Kwang-Ok 1994; Demmer 2006: xixii) make clear, performative contexts such as rituals and shamanic practices are often used as platforms where statehood and modernity are challenged, opened up for discussion or overtly criticized. Accordingly, modern and so-called traditional concepts are interwoven in a rich framework of political articulations. In the northern Nilgiris it is primarily the religious discourse and in particular the dead and healing rituals of the Sholega, nu Kurumba where the Tribal View is most explicitly articulated. Irula and Je nu Kurumba provide us with deep insights The healing and the death rituals of the Je into the various indigenous concepts of community, of the person, of justice, of a good life, etc. jointly constructed in that discourse (cf. Demmer 2001, 2006, 2007). In the

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centre of these performances stands an elaborate concept of the moral community. This nu Kuris unfolded in the poetics and rhetoric of the rituals, particularly in what the Je umba call the debates about the good and the bad. On the one hand, images of what is understood to be a bad community are developed in the ritual discourse. Thus human beings are seen as fallible and forgetful, they are like human-worms, they easily miss the correct way, they are depicted as blind, as not seeing their way they fight, become hot, they dont know to whom they are obliged or from whom they can expect to be supported, etc. Instead, people are depicted as going this way and that way, not knowing the way of proper behaviour and so on. Accordingly, good social relations are thereby threatened and fragile: they become bad, they rot like wet leaves, or like old food, and they are imagined to be endangered by fire or burning. All of these images are metaphors for harmful behaviour, for bad deeds or for the employment of black magic. The bad community as a whole is also imagined, namely as an endangered camp in the forest, as a deserted place, dried up or hot. In other parts of the discourse it is depicted as a unstable location without a stable ground for people to stay. This metaphor underscores the importance of social and moral knowledge as a solid ground for the good community. Moreover, other images articulate the bad community also as a silent and quiet place, where people dont talk with one another and as a site without sociality where people dont share with one another. The community therefore needs to be protected from the fire of the bad acts, it needs a thorn-hedge or, to say it in my own words, a kind of protection that rests on the availability of moral nu knowledge, of what a good community and what good conduct are. Indeed, the Je Kurumba not only articulate images of the bad but also of the good community. In sharp contrast with the images outlined above the good community appears as a cool forest camp, as shady and fresh, with a firm ground of knowledge and as a site where people can draw and rest upon justice. Shamans play a vital role here. They are imagined as tree-roots, as pillars for the community to rest upon, or they are likened to trees offering shade to people who are in need of rest after a long march through rough and dangerous terrain. Ancestors are depicted as mothers holding the human beings like small children in their lap, protecting them and rocking them to sleep when they are afraid or disturbed. In addition, the good community is also a location where people share food and last but not least also their knowledge of what it means to live in a good way. According to that discourse it means that people talk with one another and, most important of all, that they are engaged in debates and arguments with their ancestors and the deceased in order to reach a consensus about the most substantial and important values and cultural ideas. Listening to these discourses one can hear that the social community is based on moral values like solidarity, cooperation and the good and the bad, that people need to understand the differences between good and bad orientations and that they must nu Kurumba are a choose the correct way of living their life. Moreover, since the Je hunter/gatherer and forest-trader community, egalitarian values and virtues like shar-

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ing and caring as well as a rather individualistic concept of the social person are foregrounded. Accordingly, human beings are not seen as atomistic individuals vis--vis society nor are they understood as beings submerged in a collective mind or consciousness. Instead, people are conceptualized as social individuals (cf. Shotter 1993). This also implies that their agency is explicitly recognized in various and complex ways. According to this concept humans are not acting mechanistically or like automatons but need to use moral resources in a responsible way if they dont want to suffer. This in turn requires that they actively reach out to the moral resources of their culture and commit themselves to the values and virtues they talked about and agreed upon in ritual discourse. Incorrect and wrong activities are seen as being based on a lack of moral self-obligation and they are punished either through magic employed by the victims themselves or through interventions of the ancestors.7 Thus, wrong conduct really makes a person sick, at least if seen from this indigenous point of view. This, however, means that a person must draw on positive ideas of what constitutes a good/correct life. In other words, negative liberty and an atomistic self (cf. Taylor 1989) are not the basis of sociality here. Instead it rests upon positive liberty and a concept of the social person as a responsible and accountable subject and actor. This moral person, finally, is embedded in an expanded understanding of the community, including not only humans but also ancestor-deities and the deceased. All these beings are regarded as active participants able to speak and to argue with one another in the ritual contexts mentioned above. Mediated by the shaman those extra-humans and ordinary people negotiate in a public arena the conceptual bases of a good community and of what nu Kurumba culture counts as a good way of life. In fact, a detailed exploration of Je shows (Demmer 2001, 2006, 2007) that the rituals constitute elaborate discourses conducted with words and deeds, where central issues of social life are constantly negotiated and argued upon. In other words, the moral community and the well-being of its members directly depend on continuous moral debate and argument. Once we take this cultural background into account we are able to recognize the extent to which the Adivasi communities in the region develop their own point of view and position vis--vis conceptions and practices of the nationalist versions of modernity outlined above. Almost all Adivasi concepts of what a good life is or should be like stand in tense relationship with the culture of modernity as it is imagined by the state and by the ruling party. In this Adivasi region then, as in other areas of India,8 a latent conflict exists between the ideas and practices of the Adivasi communities and, on the other hand, the requirements of modern state institutions.
7 They have many options to punish. They can withdraw or withhold support in times of illness and other existential difficulties, they can also refuse to combat the black magic that is working against oneself, they can refuse to ask other ancestor-deities for help and so forth. 8 Cf. Pfeffer (1998) for Central India or Hardiman (1987) for Western India.

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At Sanesvaras Shrine: Social Critique and the Modernity of the State

The discourses analyzed above primarily relate to moral imaginations developed within the tribal communities themselves. In those contexts a creative and explicit engagement with or a critique of the somehow external culture of modernity as it is mediated by the state and political parties is not articulated in public but remains rather implicit. Other performances, however, do provide an arena for explicit engagements. In the northern Nilgiris a number of indigenous discourses and rituals have two features that enable actors to relate explicitly to the external discourse of statehood qualifying them as forms of local modernity. Their basic pattern corresponds closely with the internal ritual discourse and consists of the thematization of responsibility for sufferings, in the articulation of ideas about what counts as a good and a bad life, about the person as a social individual, about the need to debate those issues in the public arena and, finally, in the active involvement of deities or ancestors in those discourses. This framework, however, only provides the ground for a more explicit engagement with the values and politics of the state and modernity. To accomplish that, the traditional meanings and ritual activities are modified and enriched in such a way as to allow for critical as well as affirmative or otherwise creative and positioned voices with respect to modernity and the state. Moreover, increasingly we come across pan-cultural performances (cf. Heidemann 2006) where participation is not confined to Adivasi but where other social groups like merchants or civil servants of the Tamil Nadu government and the national central government are engaged as well. Sometimes rather traditional rituals like the healing sances of the Adivasi are performed that way. Among the Irula or Sholega, for example, the ritual clientele may occasionally include employees of state institutions, engineers of the hydroelectric power project or people working for the Tamil Nadu telecommunication services. They attend healing rituals side by side with Irula and Sholega people. Being forced to live in this rather remote region far away from home they acknowledge the competence of indigenous shamans and despite their explicit modern world-views and habitus they seek help through Adivasi healing sances. Unfortunately we dont have detailed studies of the content and scope of those discourses among shamans (resp. the deities) and their modern clientele and we dont know whether the latter, too, are confronted with moral issues regarding their responsibilities, their social conduct and justice in the same way as the Adivasi participants are when they participate in healing and death rituals. So we can only wonder whether their role as servants of the state is made a theme and discussed. In other trans-cultural performances, however, this is clearly the case and the shrine of Sanesvara provides a vivid example of how that works. Sanesvara is a deity who was brought out of the forest only recently (in 1996) by an Adivasi shaman and priest. Its shrine was built midway between the Adivasi settlements and the village and since then what was first only a small hut of clay and bam-

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boo has now become a quite impressive small temple attracting an ever-growing number of clients. Basically its performative pattern corresponds with the Adivasi rituals described above. At Sanesvaras shrine the discourse links issues of illness, suffering and well-being with the morality and correct behaviour of the clients. It also implies the embodiment of the deity and extended debates between the shaman (resp. the deity) and ordinary participants serving as arenas where the responsibility for sorrowful experiences is discussed. In addition, it serves as a forum where substantial concepts of what counts as a good and a bad life, where ideas of the person as a social individual and where the fundamental need to negotiate and argue about those themes in discourses with the deity are articulated. In this context, however, the deitys claim of being able to tell the human beings how to live in a good way is mediated in a totally renewed manner. First, not only Adivasi people but also other social groups take part. Second, a whole set of meanings is drawn from heterogeneous cultural environments (so-called cultural flows, Appadurai 1996) empowering (third) the priest to address a broad public. Accordingly, the deitys clientele no longer consists of Adivasi alone but includes village people, taxi drivers of the local region and also various types of government employees (local people but also those being transferred from other parts of Tamil Nadu and even from Delhi). As the shaman/priest proudly points out, the deity therefore not only speaks the local Adivasi languages but also Tamil, Kannada and even Hindi (!). In addition he deliberately draws on the contemporary media-plurality of India to lend new meanings to his performances and to the shrine. For this purpose he spends most of his time in the tea-shops of the village almost every day. Sitting on a bench he follows closely the current political events (local, national and international) with the help of newspapers read out to him by friends and better-educated relatives but he also takes part in the political debates that emerge in those tea-shop contexts. In addition, he keenly follows the TV news being displayed in the two larger restaurants which have television sets arranged so that not only the resident guests but also those passing by or shopping can see the program. Yet he does not passively reproduce what is heard or seen but actively (and creatively) appropriates media-strategies of newspapers and television in his own way and translates at least some of the meanings of media that seem relevant to him into the semantics of his own performances at the shrine. Thus, during his possession at the shrine, and speaking in the voice of the deity Sanesvara, he interprets, for example, current political events or natural disasters just as the newscasters do. Indeed, when we talked about the role of media in the village, he invented for me the slogan My temple is my TV and used that phrase to underline that his messages are not only as interesting and up-to-date as the TV news but even more relevant because the deity, as he said, not only talks about the past but also about the future. Sanesvaras job, he explained to me, is not simply to report events but to explain how people must behave and act in order to avoid harmful events and suffering in the future. In other words, mediating messages for him is not simply an issue of representation but an existential

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intervention into the personal life of its clients and also into local politics. This corresponds neatly with Adivasi and villagers local understandings of the power of deities. In contrast with technical media but also with political parties or the government the deity attests to its superior power through its very ability to prevent or reduce sufferings and bad experiences. This re-interpretation is only one instance of how the meanings of trans-local and even global media are actively appropriated and re-inserted, so to speak, into local contexts of meanings and social praxis. In the case at hand this semiotic creativity is extending the meanings of an indigenous discourse on morality one that was restricted to members of the Adivasi community and overcoming its communal limits it outreaches into wider social and political realms where moral issues of good or bad behaviour are discussed with respect to matters of statehood, the nation and modernity as well. The following paragraph outlines in more detail how that actually works.

The Performance at Sanesvaras Shrine

Once a week, on Saturday, the priest holds a public puja at Sanesvaras shrine consisting of worship and of offerings to the deity. Worshippers usually approach the god for healing illness and suffering or to ask for the deitys support when they go to marry, when they apply for a job, when they have trouble with relatives or colleagues at the office and so forth. Most of the time, however, the performance also includes an oral discourse with the god. Similar to the Adivasi rituals discussed above, the priest acts as a medium for the deity and becomes possessed by the god Sanesvara. Embodied in the medium and speaking through its mouth Sanesvara (resp. the medium) addresses the clients one by one, enquires about their concerns, sufferings and wishes, but sooner or later the medium also addresses the social behaviour of his interlocutors in moral terms. He wants them to disclose what kind of bad deeds they performed in their immediate social environment, why, for example, they didnt care for their relatives. Often, however, the deity extends the moral field beyond the narrow community and addresses issues relating to the institutions of the state or to the behaviour of specific government employees as well. Moreover, the deity not only talks but also intervenes, giving orders to local officers and clerks, or threatens forest guards or police personnel. In those cases Sanesvara questions whether its clients performed their duties as government employees to the disadvantage of the local forest- and village people or whether they acted to their own benefit and for their own pocket. As Sanesvara explicitly claims, it is acting to the benefit of the forest people. Those enquiries often turn, as in the Adivasi rituals above, into emotional debates where the speakers are engaged in mutual argument using narratives, memories and other rhetorical devices. A vivid example is provided by an incident that was called by Sanesvara itself (in a performance) the locking of the forest. The background was that the forest authorities had forbidden the Adivasi to enter the forest and prohibited access to the resources

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on which many of them live. They collect forest products (honey, soap-nut, tree-moos, etc.) and firewood either for their own need or for sale. The forest department saw no need to explain its act to the local Adivasi nor did it give any reason when it stopped the entry of the Adivasi. When I asked myself the only reason given was that the forest needs rest and must come to peace after people exploited it, felling trees illegally, killing elephants for ivory and so forth. The forest, it was said, must recover from the excessive misuse and the illegal tree-felling of which they accused the Adivasi. In practice this meant that in order to ensure the exclusion of the Adivasi from the forest employees of the forest department were stationed at the edge of the forests. They were nu Kurumba or Sholega into the ordered to prevent any unauthorized entrance by Je forest. If that should nevertheless happen the watchmen were advised to catch the Adivasi in flagrante and arrest the trespassers. Of course, with Sanesvaras shrine located just at the forest-edge and with the priest following closely and keenly political events of all sorts, this did not escape his notice. And indeed, when shortly after that order a puja was performed at the shrine Sanesvara, embodied in the pujari, made the incident a theme to discuss. During the performance the deity/medium asked some of thedevotees assembled in the shrine to hasten to the forest-spots where the watchmen were hiding to catch Adivasi trespassers and call them in the name of Sanesvara to appear in front of him immediately. Soon afterwards two watchmen did indeed appear and the deity interrogated them about why they were locking the forest and took them to task. At the same time it intimidated the forest personnel with words like: Dont you know how dangerous it is here at night, where elephant and bears and tigers wait for you?. In addition it shamed them by suggesting their cowardice and, at the same time, underlined the courage, the competence and the right of the Adivasi people to enter and also to use the forest. The deity justified that claim and pointed out that the Adivasi belong to the forest, that they are the children of the forest (kadu makkalu), and accordingly, since Sanesvara is also the Lord of the forest, they are Sanesvaras children as well. Sanesvara, the deity claimed, will protect them and take care of them: This is my forest, the forest children and the coolie people [Adivasi working for daily wages are my children, it announced in front of the forest staff. The consequence of the deitys intervention was that the following day both forest watchmen reported ill and did not appear for work. Moreover, others also refused to do the job by referring to the great danger of nocturnally-moving elephants (which actually was true enough). Finally, the locking of the forest was cancelled and the deitys intervention turned out to be successful. Another example of Sanesvaras interventions is represented by a performance where the well-being of a policeman, himself an Adivasi of the Sholega community, was at issue. He came to the shrine with his family members (his pregnant wife plus mother) and asked the deity to protect the forthcoming delivery of his child. After puja the deity embodied itself in the priest and entangled the clients in a moral debate. In particular it reminded the policeman of his responsibilities vis--vis his own forest people (the Sholega community), and also mentioned the locking of the forestand it

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raised further questions regarding justice and the state politics, without, however, going into concrete details. In rather general terms it told the Sholega policeman to act in favour of the well-being of the Adivasi and suggested he should resist orders of the government when they were directed against the well-being of the deitys children, the forest children, as it said. A similar debate on morality and modernity occurred, to cite a last instance, in a sance where relationships between illness, the state and the modern medical welfare nu Kurumba had submitted a seriously-ill system were made an explicit issue. Some Je relative to the local government hospital, where according to law, free treatment is to nu Kurumba knew this, of course, and accordbe provided to Adivasi people. The Je ingly demanded from the physician on duty a treatment free of cost. Nevertheless, they were asked to pay a certain amount. Moreover, the treatment did not improve the womans condition (in my judgement because she was treated wrongly) and instead nu Kurof becoming better her suffering increased. After waiting for some days her Je umba relatives went to the shrine of Sanesvara in order to ask the deity for help, to heal her and also to clear up from where the difficulties are coming from. When the clients had given their offerings the deity raised the issue of the bad behaviourof the hospital staff. On the other hand, however, the deity also blamed the weakness of nu Kurumba ancestor-deities whom the Je nu Kurumba usually consult for the purJe pose of healing (see Demmer 2007). Sanesvara questioned those deities power, undernu Kurumba clients should henlined in contrast its own force, demanded that the Je ceforth worship the deity Sanesvara and recognize it as the ultimate power in the region. Finally, and without the explicit consent of the clientele, it agreed to help and also to take the hospital employees to task and make them account for their bad behaviour without, however, identifying any particular persons, names or positions. In sum, all these cases show that the deity (resp. the priest as medium) pursues its own interpretation and its own policy with regard to modernity and the state. At the shrine explicit criticisms are articulated, being particularly directed against modern governmental institutions like the forest department or the hospital staff. Thus the inability of the hospital to overcome the suffering of people and the irresponsible and arbitrary orders of the forest department, locking out the Adivasi from the forest and preventing them getting an income by themselves, are articulated in a public arena. In other cases it is the corruption of local policemen and government physicians that is brought up for discussion. Moreover, these case studies also show how these criticisms are articulated with reference to a traditional idea of sociality, namely the concept of the moral community. Accordingly, issues of illness, suffering and wellbeing are linked with moral issues, with correct behaviour and a good way of leading a proper life. In addition, these quests are related to the power, morality and demands of the modern governmental state and in particular with respect to its institutions. Ultimately this discourse argues that it is the deity and not the state that governs the forest, the children of the forest and their well-being, as well as the other non-tribal clients seeking its support. According to that interpretation the government employees

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are responsible to the deity as well and they are advised to act in solidarity with the Adivasi since the latter belong to the forest and to the deity itself. The political consequence of this idea is that the deity acts in practical micro-political terms: it intervenes in the politics of the forest department by exercising its authority over the employees and it takes the local people and government employees to task, telling them not to forget the Adivasi and not to act against them. Those who dont follow the deitys command are threatened with consequences (e. g. illness or failure of their forthcoming enterprises).

Conclusion
The paper explored the multi-sited ethnography of a South Indian region and, to use Sherry Ortners term, its political and cultural authenticity (1995:176), in particular the various modes of political action in a local cultural environment constituted by multiple and complex agencies. Focusing on relationships between the Adivasi tribal people and the modern post-colonial state in the Northern Nilgiri region of South India it described the extent to which modernity, the state and Adivasi communities are engaged in complex often tense but also creative political relationships with each other. This field does not represent an arid dichotomy (Hann 1995) between state and local cultures or, as it were, between tradition and modernity. Instead, we observe the negotiation and construction of a specific form of local modernity or, more accurately, the making of a plurality of local modernities, each striving to gain hegemony with respect to what counts as the best or the most preferable vision of a good life. On the one hand, two kinds of modernity can be seen to compete with each other. One version, that of the Indian nation-state, aims at hegemony by means of governmental strategies and by the various micro-practices described above to implement among the Adivasi a post-colonial culture of modernity. Its vision of modern life largely conforms to the model of modernity as it was first developed in the West, in the Province of Europe (Chakrabarty 2000) and is committed, as Charles Taylor (1999) has called it, to a basically a-cultural imagination of modernity. Yet this vision of modernity cant claim complete and already-implemented hegemony in the sense that it receives widespread consent and thus dominates the mind of the population. Instead it has to struggle with a second, modified and regionally-specific variant of modernity, the hypermodern version articulated in the political performance of the then ruling party, the ADMK. That concept of modernity is based on two sets of values. On the one hand, it stresses values of the modern suburban domain: here the ideal social unit is the primary consanguine family, living in the suburban metropolis, in the modest but neat and fully-equipped home of its own, consuming modern consumer-goods and with access to modern educational institutions. This set of values, however, is supplemented or enriched with a second set of values that derive from and relate to the contemporary global media-plus-high-tech world. Its attractiveness derives from the idea of

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mastering the most modern and sophisticated technologies (helicopter, ecologicallyadapted hydroelectric power plant) and media (above all, the latest variants of television). Moreover, in contrast to the national vision of modernity it doesnt regard the traditional village way of life as backward and mistaken. Instead this hypermodern version of modernity imagines traditional life in rather neutral terms: village life, so the message goes, is the base of our Tamil culture, but today it has to be enriched and modernized. Accordingly, this idea of modernity is incorporating rather than simply excluding certain aspects of the Tamil villagers way of life. Religion and gender roles, for example, are not depicted as wrong but only as somewhat insufficient: they dont provide access to modern goods and lifestyles. In modern life, this vision claims, those aspects have to be enriched by an approximation to urban modernity and by a certain redefinition of other key values, e. g. the image of the Tamil mother that plays such an important role in Tamil culture. Both of the above visions constitute particular imaginations and practices of a governmental modernity. Local Adivasi communities actively respond to and engage with both visions through a complex set of activities that range from creative appropriation to criticism and even to cultural resistance. The political authenticity in the region thus includes ways of affirmatively appropriating the measures taken by the modern nation-state to develop Adivasi communities: job opportunities as a result of reservation policies, free medical services, cooperative stores, family-cards and so forth. Equally significant, however, are the complex ways Adivasi actors engage with that modernity in critical and creative terms. These consist of the various forms of everyday infrapolitics as described above but they also include the continuous attempts to articulate, mainly in ritual performances, what we have called the tribal view and to produce a culturally-specific subaltern consciousness. This vision imagines sociality in terms of the moral community and its communitarian world-view offers a conceptual basis for the infra-political strategies in other words, it constitutes a specific form of cultural resistance. Last but not least, the Tribal View also provides ground for the establishment of a new forum the shrine of the deity Sanesvara where the state and its modernities are engaged with in creative and critical ways. Moreover, the religious performances at the shrine of Sanesvara on the one hand attest to the creative and transformative appropriation of new and partially-global cultural flows and elements (e. g. the format of television news) while at the same time they expand the discourse community from a primarily tribal clientele to include a wider range of people from the village, the region and even from metropolitan centers like Chennai and Delhi. On the other hand, these performances re-ground, justify and thus defend local identity and the Adivasi commitment to their own values and concepts against the claims of the modernities of the states. In other words: a critique of governmental and hypermodern state modernities is articulated with reference to an idea of sociality in indigenous terms, namely in those of the moral community as a tradition of engaged argumentation.

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As at other socio-cultural sites where global flows, states politics and local culture meet, mingle or clash (see Friedman 1994) the actors at the shrine of Sanesvara combine a set of modern, hypermodern and allegedly traditional elements and establish a new discursive forum where urgent contemporary social and cultural issues are brought up and debated in a creative but also critical and political way. At the same time this discourse tries to expand the hegemony read of this tribal view into the new and wider clientel of the deity. This newly-invented tradition contributes in a vital way to the emergence of a specific and local modernity or, as Friedman (ibid.:109) expressed it: There is a common core in these different domains of practice. There is an appropriation of modernity by means of a set of transformed traditional practices. The religious shrine of Sanesvara actually appears as a similar space where people are actively engaged in the construction of a culturally-specific form of local modernity.

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