Alice Tilche’s Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age is an anthropological study of museums and religious conversion movements as disciplinary techniques and resources that variously shape the lives of subjects amidst ongoing conditions of marginalization and dispossession in an Indigenously inhabited region in contemporary India. Drawn from research conducted over 2005–2017 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, home to approximately 8.9 million subjects who self-identify as Adivasi and/or Tribal, the book focuses on the Chhota Udaipur district, where Rathava Adivasis constitute the dominant Tribal community. Here, Tilche tracks how Indian discourses of Indigeneity articulated by non-Adivasi elites are affirmed and adopted by subjects through an immersive exploration of a museum, Hindu sectarian movements of religious conversion, and an examination of the varying degrees to which they “lead to the cultivation of new semiotic ideologies and bodily dispositions” that shape how subjects relate to art, oral narratives, rituals, and practices of leisure and consumption (9). While recognizing the overlaps between the two, the book differentiates discourses of Tribal culture articulated in the domain of art, including museums, from those by Hindu sects outside it. The former is framed as the “project of preservation” promoted by the postindependence Indian state and India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and supported by the Indian National Congress (INC) party. In contrast, the latter is grouped as the project of “erasure” mobilized by organizations that make up India’s Hindu Right and supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (8). Over an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion, the book charts the ascent of the project of erasure and the relative decline of the project of preservation since the late twentieth century, which broadly corresponds with the INC’s decline and the BJP’s rise in electoral politics in Gujarat and at the federal level.

Based on a review of historical, art historical, and anthropological scholarship, the introduction and chapters one and two highlight the entangled development of ideas of Tribes, Tribal art, and Tribal culture associated with the postindependence Nehruvian state and with Hindu-centric ideas of Adivasi identity and culture. For instance, Ananda Coomaraswamy’s writings on craft as a culturally sovereign domain of practice, the nationalist art movement led by Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal, the anthropologist Verrier Elwin’s scholarship on Adivasi art as an object of salvage, and the creation of the National Crafts Museum are highlighted as instances that materialize discourses of Adivasi subjects and art as “India’s double others” (33). Similarly, the introduction and chapter two trace the history of contemporary socioreligious movements seeking to draw Tribal communities to the Hindu fold to Gandhi’s formative efforts to integrate Adivasi communities “within the nationalist struggle,” the sociologist G.S. Ghurye’s recognition of Tribes as “backward Hindus,” and the structural conditions that consolidated the presence of sectarian movements in Adivasi-inhabited regions in western India (11). Tilche is careful to note the contradictory effects of these movements, strengthening regional Adivasi “land redistribution campaigns” in the absence of state support while also contributing to the spread of “Hindu-dominant values” that marginalize “. . . adivasi languages and heritage . . . ” (63).

Based on primary research and interviews with artists, curators, activists, and sectarian leaders, among others, the next five chapters explore the desires, ambiguities, ambivalences, and tensions that characterize the fraught processes of people’s participation in the creation, curation, and recollection of Adivasi cultural practices as objects of art, history, and identity and their effects across the “realms of the home, the body, and the landscape” (9). Chapter three is on the development of Vaacha: Museum of Voice, conceived as a project to counter the ethnographic gaze with “adivasis as its curators” (76). However, rather than facilitate the creation of a “platform for adivasis to express their own culture,” Tilche finds “processes of translation, reflexivity, and de- and re-familiarization” used to collect, label, and display objects in the museum to be sites of friction and confusion, due to the “paternalistic” model of museology it employs and the social hierarchies between non-Adivasi elites and Adivasi subjects it reproduces in its operations (86, 99). The chapter also highlights the BJP-led national government’s shift away from the patronage of a Nehruvian paradigm of Tribal art as a factor that weakens the reach of the museum. In contrast, chapter four sees in sectarian causes such as “new bhagat movements” unfolding outside the confines of the museum a far more compelling “process of museumization” that inspires subjects to distance themselves from sacred understandings of regional landscapes tied to Adivasi origin stories, abstain from the everyday and ritual practices of consuming alcohol and meat, revise how they recollect their traditions, and associate conversion with a sense of “Adivasi economic betterment and general well-being” (110, 117, 112). The success of this process is also attributed to the presence of an efficient institutional and funding model of Hindu proselytization that operates with the state’s support.

Resembling the waning appeal of the museum, chapter five narrates the demise of Pithora, a form of ritual painting executed on the walls of Adivasi homes by lakharas or painters with a badva or ritual specialist (123). The chapter highlights how the rising influence of sectarian movements amongst local communities has resulted in the “purification, ritual neglect, and erasure” of the tradition (140). Based on how subjects talk about Pithora in terms of “style” and “authenticity,” Tilche also anchors the decline of the ritual painting tradition to the burgeoning market for Pithora as a secular object of Tribal art that began in the late twentieth century (132). Chapter six addresses a more dispersed range of “material transformations” unfolding across the realms of the domestic and the public, such as the construction of private homes with brick and concrete instead of mud, the emergence of Hindu temples, the adoption of new sartorial styles, and dietary habits characterized by Hindu-centric religious abstentions (147). For Tilche, the changes demonstrate the success of Hindu nationalism as a cultural project in which “Adivasi subjects were neglecting and erasing aspects of their culture . . . ” and conforming to “the canons of a new Hindu modernity . . . ” (147). Similarly, chapter seven casts a light on the weakening appeal of public observances and performances of Adivasiness historically celebrated by regional communities and the rise in popularity, in their place, of religious festivals like Navratri promoted by Hindu nationalist organizations in recent decades. Based on a multi-sited ethnography, Tilche argues that the project of preservation declined because it failed to “bring about wider social transformation,” while the “aspirational” appeal of socioreligious movements grew due to the “aesthetic transformation” they effected across public and private domains of life (195, 9).

In Adivasi Art and Activism, Tilche weaves a promising thread across disparate objects and spaces and a complex cast of characters to address the urgent and under-explored issue of Indigeneity in the age of Hindu nationalism. The book highlights the importance of studying museums and curation in relation to a wider field of secular and religious exhibitionary cultures and the presentation of selves in private and public capacities, which stands to strengthen art historical and anthropological studies of South Asian art, visual culture, and museums and public culture as a “zone of contestation” (Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, “Museums are Good to Think: Heritage on View in India,” No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, eds. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, Routledge, 2015, 176). By investigating the rising appeal of Hindu nationalism in the Adivasi-inhabited region to a longer history of “images, objects, and bodily performances,” it also furthers critical humanities engagements with South Asian festivals, image cultures, and devotional practices as the ground rather than the epiphenomenon of politics (18). However, the analysis of art, processes of “museumization,” and the aesthetic in the book remains partial. For instance, Tilche observes that Adivasi subjects appreciate dioramic displays of “life-size statues of tribal men and women . . . ” (28).This is a compelling premise for a deeper engagement with an exhibitionary form otherwise critiqued for reproducing the salvage paradigm, but it remains unexplored in chapter one or three. Similarly, Tilche cites studies that have challenged the relationship between what Walter Benjamin differentiates as the “cultic value” and “exhibitionary value” of art as less than absolute but does not actively track its implications in relation to the reproduction and reconfiguration of Pithora paintings in chapter five (124-25).

In chapter six, Tilche reads the adoption by Adivasi subjects of new dietary prohibitions, clothing styles, and other changes promoted by Hindu sectarian movements as signs of what Jacques Ranciere calls an “aesthetic revolution” (146). However, given that the changes point to an expansion of Hindu hegemony in the region, it is difficult to read them as other than the production of consensus rather than what might be read, following Ranciere, as “dissensus” or a “redistribution of the sensible” (Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, 107; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Bloomsbury, 2013, 40). Perhaps the most productive of all the critical frameworks that the book draws on is Webb Keane’s idea of “semiotic ideology . . . people’s background assumption about what signs are and how they function in the world” (“Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller, Duke University Press, 2005, 191). But in the absence of a concerted engagement in their worthy lines of inquiry with the iconicity and indexicality of objects and a demonstration of how their bundling in and outside the museum produces new semiotic orientations, Tilche often ends up privileging what Keane might qualify as a Saussurean analysis, which presumes that signs are the garb of meaning.