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Meet four Adivasi intellectuals whose lives have changed the politics and conversations about indigenous people, says G VISHNU

IN AN atmosphere where television debates are defining intellectuals — based on decibel level and the crispness of your byte — some worldviews risk being reduced to whimper. For large swathes of India, the word Adivasi is that invisible forest-dweller, mostly backward and currently engaged in a Maoist avatar. It is a giant step to then imagine Adivasis whose intellect and dialogue have brought about paradigm shifts in the Adivasi society.

To understand Adivasi society is to understand how the world beyond our lives constrains us. Here is a window to worlds that escape our English-dominated civil society discourses. Be it the question of developmentinduced displacement, the Maoist movement, several insurgencies in the Northeast, conflict between conservation of nature and human rights, the Adivasis have been at the receiving end. These intellectuals are insiders to worlds that desperately require voicing as well as representation. Unlike thousands of their academic counterparts, here are a few articulating the needs, desires and pathos of the parallel universes that are in conflict today.

The article - and this is only a teaser - presents 4 adivasi intellectuals who are involved in the lives of adivasi and adivasi communities as they attempt to make sense of systematized attack on their communities and attempt to build strategies within a democratic framework. It is unfortunate - but perhaps expected - that even as they participate with their beleagured communities in trying to thwart a corrupt and rapacious force driven largely by the greed of the Indian state, their solutions will provide answers to much that haunts Indian democracy.