This book collates papers I have written over the past twenty-five years based on intensive long-term engagement with the adivasi (mainly Santal) population of the Santal Parganas region of Jharkhand state. The main arguments presented in this book, while located within particular historical and political moments in the region, have global relevance across multiple disciplines, like development and gender studies and explorations of indigeneity and ecological change. The chapters in this book contribute to the production of knowledge in three broad areas.

First, they contribute to an improved understanding of gender as contextual, relational and dynamic, moving beyond the socially constructed roles and relationships between men and women. Such an understanding generates the need for reflexive methodologies that provide possibilities for studying relationships across space, time and institutional settings. Second, they seek to deepen our understanding of adivasi societies in relation to their ecological environment, especially their conceptualizations of land and labour, and how these ideologies feed into shaping unequal power relationships amongst themselves and with other groups. Third, they help us realise the importance of locating these dynamic relationships, whether at the level of the household or the community, and the interlocking of personal or individual, community and ecological needs and aspirations, within the changing political and economic context.

On 2 August 2000, the parliament approved the Bill for the reorganisation of Jharkhand as a separate state. Much has been written about the politics and governance of the newly established Jharkhand state and the continuities and changes in livelihoods. But analyses of gender roles and relations, and how these are affected by resource relations, livelihood transitions and the new narratives of citizenship, are missing from the discourse. This provided me the space to focus on the opportunities and the contradictions that have emerged in the new state, as aspirations of the state and its adivasi populations diverge – the former focusing on capitalist growth and the latter on the control over natural resources.

Methodologically, my approach combines historical and ethnographic methods from a feminist epistemological lens. I combine early insights on gender, indigeneity and ecology from colonial archival records like the land revenue settlement records of the early twentieth century with life history narratives from the post-independence years to the present.