UC Riverside

My dissertation traces the valences of a moment in contemporary Anglophone publishing in India that is slowly marking the presence of an articulate Indigenous voice. In contemporary India, the Adivasi–sometimes called tribal or Indigenous, each term mired in a painful history––exist in a perpetual zone of disenfranchisement. With increasing encroachment upon traditionally held resources and occupations, Adivasi individuals have had to negotiate an exponentially threatened lifeworld. However, there is resistance to be found. A complex picture of Adivasi creative intervention emerges, challenging any attempt to speak for the Adivasi body by the dominant order. I examine the possibilities of one such intervention via the contemporary Anglophone picturebook published by the alternative publisher Tara Books. Tara Books has established itself as a publishing house reputed for its significant and sensitive collaboration with more than one Adivasi community.The first chapter locates the 2014 Creation, illustrated by Pardhan Gond artist Bhajju Shyam, as a site of a self-representation in response to anthropological and visual appropriation of the tribal body, while chapter two examines Bhajju Shyam’s 2004 The London Jungle Book as a reversal of the colonial-ethnographic gaze. Chapter three examines the 2009 Flight of the Mermaid, also illustrated by Bhajju Shyam, to trace the possibilities of understanding Pardhan Gond art as an example of speculative aesthetics. The fourth chapter discusses Durgabai Vyam’s 2005 Sultana’s Dream and 2010 The Churki Burki Book of Rhymes to focus the picturebook on gender. Women’s labor is understood to be the “alphabet of Gond art” but its recognition is missing in the list of Pardhan Gond practitioners today. Using literary analysis, visual analysis, and ethnographic interviews of the artists, the study builds on the pioneering work of scholars Michelle Raheja, Saloni Mathur, Jyotindra Jain, Roma Chatterji, and Aurogeeta Das; and breaks new ground by applying their approaches to the medium of the picturebook, at an intersection of Adivasi studies and postcolonialism, with a focus on the visual material object of the picturebook. Yet, Tara Books is a niche publishing house with a limited English-educated urban metropolitan audience. While some of their books can be bought and delivered via Amazon, only a few bookstores in urban glamorized India sell their books. This politics of accessing the Pardhan Gond picturebooks cautions us about any presumption of the Anglophone Tara practice as a democratic art that may persuade large populations. Nevertheless, the picturebook imagines a self-represented past and a self-articulated future for the Adivasi artist. By clarifying the extant discourses that coerce the Adivasi body, art, and voice into a bind of primitivism, and by investigating how an agential response can be imagined within the picturebook, my dissertation helps understand how an ostensibly limited medium may be deployed strategically by Adivasi individuals.