Negotiating difference, (un)contesting temporalities: education as a site of struggle in Adivasi identities in India

The official discourse in India constitutes the indigenous Adivasis as Indian nationals in need of education and protection. In this paper, I emphasise the dominance of a temporally framed view of development that singularly focuses on progress and change in the discursive production of Adivasi identities in a local village community. I signal the centrality of education within this view, as integral to modernisation discourse and crucial in the sustenance of a regime of protection, in the Adivasis' own articulations of their identity. Drawing on data from recent empirical research, I illustrate how the Adivasis cautiously reverberate the dominant view by deploying education, and the related 'lack' of modernity, to refer to themselves while emphatically pointing to the absence of state. I argue that the taking up of the normative discourses by the Adivasis is indicative of their ongoing negotiations of difference that use and defy the temporalised view of education.