Beyond dispossession: Situating sickle cell management in Adivasi land rights in the Nilgiris in India

Keywords: Dalit; Adivasi' Plantation; Political Ecology; Sickle Cell Disease
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Sickle cell disease—a rare genetic blood disorder—globally racialized as a “Black disease” has, in the past few decades, come to be biomedically mapped onto India’s indigenous Adivasi (translated to original inhabitants) communities. These are traditionally non-Hindu communities, pejoratively termed as “tribals” connoting their alleged “primitiveness” in the caste-based hierarchical society of India. Furthermore, Adivasis are relegated to the lowest position in the caste hierarchy along with Dalit or previously “untouchable” communities, also biomedically characterized as having a high prevalence of sickle cell disease. Particularly for the Adivasis, the “primitive” ascription has meant their systemic displacement and continued dispossession in Hindu-majoritarian Indian. I investigate Adivasi sickle cell suffering within this persistent precarity in a plantation district called the Nilgiris in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India.
I interrogate, simultaneously and symmetrically: a) forest conservation policies; and b) “tribal” health interventions in the Nilgiris. I therefore emplace Adivasi sickle cell suffering in the political ecology of the plantations. The Nilgiris was an originally Adivasi territory, first transformed into a plantation frontier by the British colonial administration in the 1800s. In twentieth-century post-colonial India, the forests in the region that were not encroached by plantations were conserved through forest conservation policies that subsequently restricted access for Adivasi communities. In this paper, I interrogate the underlying ideological assumptions in “tribal” health and forest conservation policies that characterize Adivasi communities as the socio-genetic ‘other.’ Beyond highlighting disposession, my paper will emphasize on Adivasi endurance in the face of socio-politically orchestrated precarity.