Contested margins: Sukan Buru and the Adivasi struggle for space, memory, and belonging

How are sacred landscapes produced, contested, and sustained amid competing spatial imaginaries? Through the case of Sukan Buru, a sacred hill in Jharkhand’s Khunti district, the article analyses how ritual practices, memorialisation, and cultural revitalisation contribute to the production of indigenous space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews, the study employs Lefebvre’s distinction between lived and abstract space to analyse competing spatial logics. It argues that Sukan Buru is not merely an inherited landscape but a socially produced space constituted through processes of resistance, reclamation, and revival. By analysing spatial contestation, Pathalgadi memorialisation, and initiatives of cultural resurgence, the article demonstrates how Adivasis contest spatial abstraction and reproduce the hill as a lived space of collective meanings, territorial belonging, and cultural continuity. More broadly, the study shows how sacred landscapes function as counter-spatial formations through which Adivasi communities reclaim geographies, revive lifeworlds, and sustain alternative futures.