Gendered navigations of space, work and education in young Adivasi lives in India

This chapter draws on recent empirical research into discursive production of indigenous Adivasi identities through land, work, education and religion in an area of civil unrest in India. More specifically, it highlights the gendered implications of the deployment of dominant policy and legal discourses over time, with respect to the work and livelihood practices of the Adivasi Gond community. Historically, the Adivasis, or the Scheduled Tribes, have been othered internally by the colonial and postindependence Indian state through multiple regulatory discourses. This chapter illustrates how the selective utilisation of these discourses produces the Gond Adivasis as Other particularly in their local village context, impacts young people’s lives and their everyday navigations of work and education. Within this othering and navigation, it illuminates the ways in which gender remains a significant axis of difference and hierarchy. The chapter foregrounds how the discussions surrounding land, work and education are mediated by questions of spatial control and production of hierarchical power relations in relation to gender. It attends to the consequences in terms of regulation of young women’s lives within their local community context.