Abstract
This talk examines the emergence of a political voice among India’s Denotified Tribes (DNTs), communities historically criminalised and never fully secured within the postcolonial constitutional order. Drawing on a book I am co-authoring with Akshay Khanna and focusing on Budhan Stories (a living archive of films and performances produced by a collective of DNT artists), I approach this work as a practice of Indigenous survivance.
As an art of survivance, these films establish presence and continuity against erasure. They insist on the co-presence of the living and the dead and forge relational ties across communities marked by shared histories of criminalisation, in a context where whose lives and losses count remains politically regulated. Through aesthetic strategies including montage, hyper-realisation and genre-mixing, the films generate a political subject at the threshold of citizenship - one that demands recognition and yet disrupts the very grammar through which recognition is sought.
Bionote
Alice Tilche is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Museum Studies and the Co-director of CRIA, an outward-facing and interdisciplinary hub for arts-centred research at the University of Leicester. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations. Recent research includes work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism, and experimentations with arts-based research methodologies.
Tilche’s latest book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist age (UWApress, 2022) offers brilliant and illuminating insights into the ambivalent dynamics of affirmation and disparagement, and indigeneity and nation, in an increasingly majoritarian India. Her collaborative film projects have been selected for a number of international film festivals and awards.
Read more: Alice Tilche, University of Leicester