Becoming with the land: Adavasi Feminist Ontologies Among Munda Women

Abstract This paper analyzes a paradox at the center of environmental and social movements in India: Munda Adivasi (Indigenous) women are at the forefront of Indigenous movements defending traditional lands from outside intervention while often supporting landholding regimes that prevent women from inheriting the very land they defend. Scholarship examining this contradiction assumes that ethnic/Munda identity supersedes gender identity in these instances. Yet, it ignores how Munda women continually mediate this supposed divide in their everyday life practices. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper explores Munda women's being and becoming as shaped by their relational ontologies. It analyzes how Munda women in the state of Jharkhand understand and experience land, water, and forests, and how they continuously negotiate the failures of the neoliberal state through their embodied knowledge and practices. Furthermore, this research examines the ontological meanings of land and forest; the customary forms of women's land and forest use; and their everyday engagements in the kitchen, fields, and communal spaces. These lived experiences shape their being and becoming, informing their politics of land defense. I demonstrate through my research that Munda women's understanding of feminist practice is deeply embedded in their being and becoming as both Munda and women navigating the neoliberal landscape. This, in turn, shapes their politics of land defense as a complex and situated assertion of agency.