This summer, I've been working with a graduate student collaborator, Srishti Raj, on a new digital project, called Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature.
Here's the project summary:
This site aims to be an educational resource for Adivasi writing, helping to share South Asia's indigenous literature with the broader world. For those who are unfamiliar, Adivasis are South Asian indigenous communities, subject to a long history of marginalization and displacement going back to the colonial era and continuing in the present. There are more than 100 million Adivasi people in India alone, located throughout the country, with particular concentrations in central India as well as in the northeast region. For generations, Adivasis were written about rather than subjects of their own story. This site aims to help change that by centering Adivasi voices directly in a decolonial framework, and making their writings accessible to a broad readership.
I got interested in this project in part through engaging with decolonial theory focused primarily on Latin America and indigenous literatures of the Americas. Shouldn't we be talking about these ideas in South Asia as well? Unfortunately, despite many years of teaching and writing about Anglophone South Asian literature, my own knowledge on the topic of indigenous communities in South Asia was limited to people writing about Adivasis, not writing by people from those communities themselves. And my hunch was that this would likely be true for most of my peers as well: not many papers on Adivasi literature are given at conferences like the South Asian Literature Association (SALA) conference, and I don't see too many in U.S.-based journals either. (Journals published in India, like the Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, do a little better.)
Overall, this seemed like another gap in the archive -- perhaps something that could be addressed if one were willing to do some digging!
As I first conceived of this project in 2023, my basic knowledge of those Adivasi communities was itself pretty thin. I knew about Santhals and the Ho community from reading Mahashweta Devi's work, but little about the others (and there are hundreds of officially recognized Scheduled Tribes in India, with a population of more than 100 million people!). An early experiment entailed looking for maps of Adivasi communities. I wrote about my results with that research in 2023 here.
In short, our summer research process followed three stages.
- First, we quickly learned we had to be looking beyond English-language materials. By default, this summer, we have been looking at a fair amount of materials in Hindi.
- We did discover a number of helpful resources online to help us with our research.
- We have been experimentally trying to translate some key materials we've been encountering, often using generative AI translation engines.