Adivasi Life Stories: Context, Constraints, Choices

This book is about the lives of the adivasis, also known an tribals, and the circumstances in which they find themselves, in one district, Thane, in Maharashtra, Western India. Thane district has a large adivasi population of the thirty districts of Mahaeashtra, 18 percent of the population of the district and about 13 percent of the total adivasi population of the state. The book is divided into two parts. The impact of the broad social-historical processes which basically transformed the economic and social organization of the adivasis and shaped the trajectory of their collective life, and their response and resistance to them, constitute the content which is discussed in the first part of the book. The second art of the book consists of six life stories of adivasi men and women, belonging to different age groups, even generations, as narrated by them. These stories help to see how the macro historical processes impinge upon individual lives, and how each individual, in special circumstances, shapes his or her life. It is in the context of the extraordinarily difficult circumstances in which these marginalized people live and die, that individual life stories make sense. The book seeks to arrive at an understanding of the dialectical relation between the social and the personal, the collective and the individual, the macro and the micro, by using the life story method. The stories of the adivasis of Thane are the stories of suffering and deprived people all over the world who have been excluded and marginalized by the processes of development and modernization. The book will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists and activists who are concerned with the marginalized groups.