Accepted Panels

The inherent ambiguity in colonial practices of classifying scheduled caste and scheduled tribes, informed by colonial governmentality, prompted scholars to question and reorient epistemological standpoints of classifying people in scheduled caste and scheduled tribe categories. Whereas Decades of scholarship have challenged and critiqued the plane of “social” through which we make ourselves intelligible of people falling into scheduled tribes and scheduled caste categories and plays a role in informing post-colonial Indian state policy formulations. On the other hand, The colonial regimes of practices of classification led to the “disappearance” of many communities and groups from the category of tribes in the post-colonial state who are found to be scattered in different categories ranging from scheduled caste to other backward classes and sometimes in general, on a territorial basis. This paper engages with an ethnographic study of one such Kol community residing in border districts of Uttar Pradesh. Kols are classified as scheduled caste in UP and scheduled tribes in MP. The identity crisis created by the ambiguity and contradiction in practices of classification carried on and deployed by the post-colonial state manifests in conflicts regarding access and ownership of land and forest areas. Through an ethnographic study of kols living in the Sonbhdra district of Uttar Pradesh, the paper argues that the post-colonial inheritance of colonial epistemological standpoints, coupled with the state’s standoffishness subsequently leading to internal colonization of bureaucracy by caste groups, have resulted in the structural production of poverty as a form of structural violence. The paper further argues that the constitution and reconstitution of subalternity (on the one hand, negotiating current SC status and the struggle of becoming ST) has produced and reproduced myriads of forms of violence, producing social silence where silence depicts not a lack of speech but the absence of power.