Expropriation of Land and Cultures: The Odisha Story and Beyond

In a state such as Odisha in which Dalit and tribal groups comprise about 40 per cent of the total population, the issue of ‘access’ to land and resources has apparently been central to all conflicts. For traditional communities, ‘access’ is directly linked to civilizational paradigms and cultural ethos, which rather decide their ‘economics’, and not the other way round that may be true for modern, techno-centric civilizations. Most mainstream discourses of history have, however, tried to locate the crisis in the ‘absence of state interventions’. But, a dig into the social history points to deeper roots of the crisis, which rather intensified after the entry of the ‘welfare’ State. The article attempts to establish linkages between marginalization of traditional communities (often to the extent of cultural genocide) and the growing political articulation of the same groups in myriad ways and methods, keeping in the heart of the argument the less-talked-about processes of ‘cultural appropriation’.