English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Paper

Millenarian dreams, modern aspirations: Tribal community-making and contentious politics in colonial Chotanagpur

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons101456

Chandra,  Uday
Religious Diversity, MPI for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Chandra, U. (2014). Millenarian dreams, modern aspirations: Tribal community-making and contentious politics in colonial Chotanagpur. MMG Working Paper, (14-01).


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0018-F413-C
Abstract
This paper interrogates the concept of “millenarianism,” which has been employed since the 1970s in South Asia and beyond to read subaltern religious movements in an anti-colonial, even proto-nationalist, light. I demonstrate that this anti-colonial reading of millenarian pasts rests on a secular understanding of subaltern politics that avoids a serious study of socio-religious change. Modern statecraft is treated by such scholars, following Max Weber, as secular, and subalterns are then taken to be an oppositional category in which secularization has not yet occurred. Against such a perspective on subaltern-state relations in modern colonial and postcolonial contexts, this paper deploys a range of oral and archival sources to delineate the relationship between socio-religious change and agrarian transformations, thereby revealing the curious modernity of millenarianism among the Mundas, an adivasi or “tribal” group in the Chotanagpur region of eastern India.