11/17: The Tale of Tadmetla: Extracts from The Burning Forest

November 17, 2016
6:30-8:30 pm
Skylight Room

Nandini Sundar will draw on The Burning Forest to comment on a recent spate of attacks on Adivasi villages by vigilante forces in Bastar. In her new book The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar (Juggernaut, 2016), Sundar chronicles how the armed conflict between the government and the Maoists in central India has devastated the lives of some of India’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens. The Burning Forest details how the Salwa Judum – a government sponsored vigilante movement – killed hundreds of adivasis and drove thousands of villagers into camps. The book unravels the links between counterinsurgency and extractive capitalism in what is today one of India’s most militarized regions.

Speaker: Nandini Sundar, Delhi University

Nandini Sundar is professor of sociology at Delhi University. Her research spans adivasi history and politics, civil wars and counterinsurgency, law and struggles over natural resources, and the intellectual history of anthropology and sociology in India. She is the author of Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (Oxford University Press, 1997) and has edited and co-edited a number of books, including The Scheduled Tribes and their India (OUP, 2016) and Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development (with Aparna Sundar, Sage, 2014). The winner of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2010 and the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research 2016, Sundar is actively engaged in public debate in India. Her public writings are available at nandinisundar.blogspot.in

Discussant: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

This event is sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, Graduate Center, CUNY. It is free and open to the public.