Location: Milgate Room, AD Hope Building
Time: 3pm, Friday 15 June
Speaker: Elvin Yifu, CHL, CAP

Tribal communities in Central and Eastern India, also known as adivasis, are considered to be the most underprivileged and marginalized in India.  In response to this endemic marginalization, adivasi organizations have engaged in activism to advocate for the welfare and social upliftment of adivasis. My project aims to examine this engagement in activism through an ethnographic study of two adivasi organizations, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and Tudum Debba, and their pursuit of the ‘common good’ (rights, development and identity) for the Koyas, a tribal community located in the region of Telangana, India. Through their welfare programs and activities, both organizations claim to be ‘doing good’ for the Koyas but have differing ideologies of what does this ‘good’ entail. I suggest that these differing ideologies permeate their welfare programs which in turn shapes different perceptions of what it means to be an adivasi in India today. As a corollary, I am interested in how activist’s from both organizations embody these ideologies in their everyday life and the ways they define what an adivasi should be and how an adivasi ought to live. Through situating the project in a village where activists from both organizations reside, I hope to show that activism in this context is not merely a struggle for rights and justice. Rather, it involves deeper issues of identity, ethics and differing notions of an emancipatory and transformative future for the adivasis in India.