‘Fractured Communities’ by Umar Khalid: Scholarship meets commitment to marginalised lives
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Since Umar Khalid first told me during one of our meetings at Jawaharlal Nehru University that he was working on the history of Adivasis in Singhbhum district for his doctoral thesis, I had looked forward to reading it. Much has happened in the intervening years. He was first vilified, arrested and prosecuted for his alleged role in the JNU protest meeting over Afzal Guru in 2016, and even survived an armed attack by a fanatic two years later. His name also surfaced briefly in the Bhima Koregaon case, though it disappeared when the case was recast as an alleged Maoist conspiracy under the UAPA, leading to the arrest of 16 of us from across the country.
A few months after my own incarceration, Khalid himself landed in prison in another politically charged prosecution arising out of the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Delhi and continues to be in jail, now in his sixth year, without trial. Despite these extraordinary ordeals, he completed his doctoral thesis and, after JNU refused to accept it, secured its submission through judicial intervention.
Seeing it finally published as Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power was therefore a source of immense satisfaction. The foreword by Ramachandra Guha...