The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 53, 1 (2016): 1–23 SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/0019464615619549 Writing the Adivasi: Some historiographical notes Prathama Banerjee Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India prathamabanerjee@gmail.com This essay explores the possibility of a new feld of research called adivasi/tribal studies. It refects on how adivasi history and adivasi subjectivity have evolved both in the domain of disciplinary knowledges and in India’s national and regional politics. Time and again refer- ring to our experience of how dalit studies have come about in India, and with gender studies somewhere in the background, the essay argues that in order to carve out a feld of adivasi studies, we must revisit histories of political and literary representation, political and cultural autonomy, vernacular languages and indeed religion and conversion. At the same time, we need to rethink land, territory and ecology together. Can adivasi studies become a separate disciplinary feld, in the way of gender studies and dalit studies? What are the advantages of carving out a semi-autonomous domain of enquiry, in the name of the adivasi? How does one think of such a feld—as the feld of operation of a special subject, namely, the adivasi, the tribe, the indigene or as a feld constituted by a set of distinctive issues such as land, forest, myth, language or as a distinctive intellectual orientation per se? What could be the rela- tionship of such a feld to mainstream disciplines, such as history, economics and anthropology? And how does such a feld compel us to rethink our relationship with text, archive and feld, that is, the evidentiary paradigm that grounds social sciences today? These are questions that I shall engage with in this essay, in conversation with the other essays that make up this volume. 1 Of these, the last question calls for particular emphasis, because it centrally animates all the essays in this volume. One of the challenges of doing adivasi/tribal studies is that tribes and adivasis are almost always invisible in modern state archives, where they surface only as objects of counter-insurgency and/or policy. Adivasis and tribes also do not fgure as subjects of archaeology and textual exegesis. While this is true for most subaltern subjects—the fact that it is diffcult to write their 1 In this essay, I use both the terms adivasi and tribe because while in areas such as Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh communities have chosen to replace the term tribe with the more positive term adivasi, in the northeast, the term adivasi refers to migrants from central India. Indigenous groups of the northeast choose to call themselves tribes in order to distinguish themselves from such later ‘encroachers’.