The Tribal Question And The Cultural Dilemma: Reading Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar's The Adivasi Will Not Dance

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the intricacies of the Santhal identity and the multifarious challenges posed to it since the inception of British colonial advances on the Indian subcontinent, navigating through a travesty of memories, which leave only footprints on the socio-political textual knowledge canvas. Landscape, as the ‘poetry of earth’ (Keats 83), partakes a garb of a neo-liberal fatality as and when the all-intrusive idea of ‘home’ transcends the wistful spatial limit. Focusing on Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar's The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015), the paper alludes to the materiality of the Adivasi life in motion, exiting the historical stereotypes and pervading into the realms of morbid locales. The Adivasi is always amidst a cultural dilemma, trying to establish its own place within the demarcations of post-colonial scholarship and the rudimentary legitimacy that is granted by the elite intelligentsia. The Adivasis have been, at times, treated as heinously as Naxalites and marginalized as the Dalits, so much so that a distinguished section of litterateurs still consider them incapable of contemplation and decision-making. I explore Shekhar’s story in this realm, treating the text as a fragmentation of the environment that becomes immobile with circumstances embedded in the Santhal lifestyle. The preservation of a settled landscape renders ‘fleeing’ impossible and the indigenous population endures a fermenting suffocation, ‘unsettled’ with the change of domesticity. This paper aims to travel with the narrator, grafting a constellation of this unprecedented derogation of development and adapting the reflective narratives into a memorial landscape of its own.