Abstract
Prasanna Nayak highlights the asymmetry in the flow of citizenship by examining the case of tribal Orissa. Nayak argues that tribals who inhabit the hills and forests of Orissa enjoyed citizenship rights in their traditional set up. Culturally, they had inherited this variant of citizenship as padarias (rightful territorial groups) and khunt-katidars (early occupants of land, who slashed and cleared tree stumps). Despite many constitutional safeguards the modern state has failed to address this core issue of tribal citizenship and traditional rights. In consequence, tribal areas in Orissa, and those in the neighboring states and elsewhere in India have become the breeding ground of Naxalites. Tribal citizenship in modern India, in Nayak’s view, is at a crossroads.
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In the ethnographic accounts of tribes of Orissa, and of India for that matter that, history, and especially ethno-history has been neglected (cf. Nayak 2001a). The use of the phrase “kingly citizenship” in the chapter is a pointer towards reconsidering tribespeople and their cultures and dispelling some of our misconceptions about them (cf. Nayak 2001b).
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It emerged from an hour-long interview conducted by Professor Mitra with the author of this article at Utkal University, India that “there always was the idea and the concept of citizenship” and the tribals in Orissa inhabiting ethnic territories behaved and acted in every sphere as citizens, and the view that citizenship is an exclusively modern concept is refuted here (cf. transcript by Mitra 2009).
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The author worked together with H. Kulke and B. Schnepel in a research project sponsored by the German Research Council (DFG) to investigate the interaction of the king of the princely state of Keonjhar and the Bhuiyan tribe from historical and ethno-historical perspectives, and came up with the view that the Bhuiyan citizenship is kingly (see Nayak 2010b).
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The unresolved tribal development issues have been mentioned in the Report of Working Group for Empowering the Scheduled Tribes during the Xth V Year Plan 2002, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Govt. of India.
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Nayak, P.K. (2013). Inheritance of “Kingly Citizenship”: Tribals at Crossroads in the Modern State of Orissa. In: Mitra, S. (eds) Citizenship as Cultural Flow. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34568-5_11
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