In light of the controversy that has erupted over Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), hosting the world anthropology congress 2023, a few activists which includes indigenous community members,  examine the ideology and cultural assumptions that dictate the pedagogical function schools like KISS perform and reproduce in the name of providing free education to children from Adivasi/Indigenous societies.  

In 2020, more than 300 Adivasi community leaders, academics, poets and writers wrote petitions protesting the decision of IUAES (International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences) and WAU (World Anthropological Union) to host the World Congress of Anthropology at Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) – a factory school in Bhubaneswar, touted as the largest residential boarding school for Adivasi/Indigenous children in the world. The World Congress of Anthropology-2023 was supposed to be organised in partnership with the Indian Anthropological Association, Utkal University, Sambalpur University and Delhi University. Following the petitions, sent through emails to IUAES & WAU, on 16th August 2021, IUAES and WAU put out a public statement withdrawing their collaboration with KISS and further decided not to host the World Congress at KISS.

Although IUAES’ World Congress venue has been shifted to Delhi on ethical grounds, KISS spuriously plans to host a congress by the name World Anthropology Congress (WAC, 2023) from August 9th to 14th, 2023, along with a newly formed anthropology platform called United Indian Anthropology Forum (UIAF) as its main organiser. This forum came into existence after IUAES’s decision not to host the World Congress of Anthropology at KISS and is essentially a perception management shield being coordinated by a group of anthropologists from the KISS campus in Bhubaneswar. Its theme reads “Anthropology in Public Sphere: Indigeneity, Social Justice, Sustainability and Global Peace.”

KISS-WAC 2023 Poster

The concept note of the Congress at KISS reads:

“…Tragedy of wars is that these are premised on anthropological construction of ‘the other’ and ‘othering’ and annihilation of the other as ‘destructive rationality.’ The discipline of anthropology since its inception is engaged in conservations and preservations of indigenous knowledge systems. Ethnographic documentation of indigenous communities provided gaze into the multiplicity of sustainable institutional practices. It paved wayfor global and national agencies to charter agendas for sustaining indignity (sic) and ensuring social justice for an equitable world…Indigenous people for centuries remained victims of war and violence based on most inhuman form of ‘othering’…Our prime concern as practicing scholars is to give voice to those seeking redressal from cultural, political, and economic exploitation and historical injustices. The counter-hegemonic resistance of the indigenous people has been supported by anthropological advocacy ever since the incident of genocide of the tribes in the Amazon.”

Although the note mentions the historical process of ‘othering’ in anthropology as a significant premise for the annihilation of the ‘other’, it also reflects the positionality of anthropologists involved in promoting this new congress to be held at the KISS campus. It not only raises questions of the deeply compromised positionality of anthropologists but also further sabotages the possibilities of anthropology as a pedagogic vocation in India that could embrace critical ways of thinking and doing anthropology with the elimination of brahminical and patronising ‘selfs’. There is a question over ‘conflict of interest’ which can’t be sidelined either as the Vice Chancellor of KISS is the President along with a few other anthropologists co-opted from public funded universities who form the governing body of UIAF.

In this context, isn’t it imperative to ask, how is the anthropological community agreeing to attend the Congress at KISS without properly examining the role of institutions like KISS in the reproduction of the anthropological ‘other’? Isn’t it pertinent to situate the KISS’ factory model of schooling and the pedagogical function it performs in the larger politico-historical context of Adivasi/Indigenous communities, whose lives are forcibly entrenched in the socio-politico-cultural economy of resource extraction, land theft, social assimilation and cultural annihilation. Anthropologist Abhijit Guha highlights this blatant compromise on the positionality of the anthropological community in India and opines that “the Indian anthropologists have failed to generate real academic debate in the public domain around the anthropology and Sociology of factory schools and their relationship with the large-scale economic deprivation of the Adivasis caused by mining, deforestation and industrialisation in the context of Hinduisation of the Adivasis in India” and this today, the author says, is “a tragic outcome of public anthropology in the country.”

Do Anthropologists attending the WAC, 2023 at Bhubaneswar agree with KISS claiming itself as the “world’s largest anthropological laboratory”? In that case, are the 30,000 children at KISS, the Adivasi/Indigenous cultures, and societies they belong to, specimens of this lab? Isn’t the World Anthropological Congress being hosted at KISS – a ‘performance’ staged and enacted by the anthropological community – a perpetuation of the everyday forms of ‘othering’ against Adivasis, but cheerlead and endorse factory model schools like KISS within the larger historiography of anthropology in India.

The Vice Chancellor of KISS and president of United India Anthropology Forum Prof Deepak Behera, along with Achyuta Samanta in the background, inaugurating the website of KISS-WAC 2023

KISS’ founder Mr Achyuta Samanta, who portrays himself as the messiah of the Adivasi/Indigenous peoples, has also been one of the greatest advocates of ‘development and ease of doing business’ terming “…the abundance of mineral resources, forest reserves, fertile arable lands and water resources as a natural bounty in the state of Odisha” waiting to be exploited by the several industries & corporations. In the same breath, he adds,“because Odisha has an affordable labor cost, it has a competitive advantage over other states and the labouring community in Odisha does not feel exploited.” This seems to be the real reason why branches of KISS are being set up across Adivasi/Indigenous inhabited regions in partnership with mining corporations and industries with vested interests in these regions. All evidence suggests that this is a strategic attempt to facilitate a violently extractive global political economy so that neoliberal capitalism in India can make comfortable inroads and profits out of the natural resources and the cheap army of labour in these peripheral geographies. At the same time, these colonial extractive strategies contain within its plot the systematic destruction of Adivasi peoples’ lands, forests and socio-cultural-ecological-language life worlds as these are the aspects of Adivasi people’s lives that constitute their resistance to extraction.

KISS entered into a strategic partnership with Vedanta Aluminium Ltd in 2012 when at the same time Dongria Kandha people in Niyamgiri hills were resisting the displacement and forcible capture of their scared lands and forests by Vedanta’s bauxite mining. Although the KISS Congress’ concept note mentions that anthropologists have been advocates of ‘counter-hegemonic resistance of Indigenous peoples ever since the incident of the genocide of the Amazonian tribes’, it cleverly obscures and does not even utter a word about the positioning of anthropologists on the partnership of KISS with extractive industries: habitual human and environment rights exploiters like Vedanta, Tata, Nalco, SNM Mining Group, Adani and many more. What else does the Adani-KISS partnership or the MoU between KISS and Vedanta Aluminium Ltd, to name a few, imply? Just two years after the KISS-Adani school was inaugurated in 2020, a high-level clearance authority headed by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Pattnaik, approved Adani’s proposal for mining projects worth over ₹57,000 crore in Odisha.

Children garlanding and cheerleading Naveen Patnaik at events organised by KISS

With diplomatic ties with most foreign embassies in India, the ‘largest boarding school’ enjoys the support of the ruling Biju Janata Dal (founder of KISS Achyuta Samanta is a Biju Janata Dal MP, from Kandhamal constituency), the Bharatiya  Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) over the years. The widespread fan-following that Mr Samanta and KISS have garnered over the years has been a carefully crafted and engineered one, with the help of several public relations firms & image-management consultancies. In fact, anyone who lives in Bhubaneswar or has closely observed the ‘growth story’ of KISS in plain sight is witness to the amount of money the institute spends on advertisements, media relations and event making – so much so that the institute boasts of 4 Guinness Book world records that it has to its name. One of these is for ‘most people brushing teeth simultaneously’ in partnership with Colgate-Palmolive Ltd, where more than 25,000 Adivasi/Indigenous children were made to stand in queues to brush their teeth. Post the program, the institute’s founder, in an interview, said, “..such a demonstration is our commitment to teaching…the right way to live and correct oral care habits that will stay with them for life”. On another occasion, in an open forum, Samanta referred to the Adivasi/Indigenous people as ‘people who just live like animals with animals in the dense forests.’

Such statements not only reflects the deep-seated brahminical and social evolutionary thinking and framing of Adivasi/Indigenous peoples but also lays bare the inherent ‘civilizing’ and “uprooting” mission of large-scale residential schools that operated in Canada, United States, Australia in the early 18th and 19th centuries recognised worldwide today as ‘conscious policy of cultural genocide’. A recent 2014 high-level committee report on development indicators among Adivasis/Indigenous peoples, headed by Prof. Virginius Xaxa, explicitly acknowledged that the government’s “guiding principle” in the years after independence was that “savage and wild tribal people ‘needed’ to be civilized by means of education outside the tribal social and cultural life”. This importance placed on residential schooling, as the report explained, later led to the “Ashramisation” of Adivasi/Indigenous education.

The institute claims to educate children from Adivasi/Indigenous societies, but the pedagogical function it performs using education as a tool is that of an ideological one – of dehumanising and continuing to gaze upon the anthropological ‘other’ which in India, since the so-called Vedic times, is consonant with how the ‘brahminical-self’ construed itself as superior, through caste hegemony, in relation to defining the Indigenous/Adivasi people – the ‘other’ – as Shudras, Ati Shudras and Vanvasis. This politics and poetics of Hinduisation through ashram and residential schools is at the core of the Hindutva project across Adivasi/Indigenous regions in India. Hindu nationalism believes that Adivasi/Indigenous people are “backward Hindus”, an idea propagated by Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, an anthropologist linked to RSS and its Hindu Rashtra Project.

Almost as proof of KISS being a laboratory of the Hinduising mission of Adivasi/Indigenous children, a huge Jagannath temple and a Hanuman temple overlook the KISS campus. Samanta, who claims to have donated money for building several Hindu temples, told a gathering of 30,000 students of KISS in a public meeting that – “KISS today is able to function or has been able to achieve whatever it has today, because Lord Jagannath has been watching over them with his big eyes open.” Puri Sankaracharya, a Hindu seer and key RSS godman who advocates Hindu Rashtra, has visited the campus more than twice and has openly spoken about Hindu nationalism to thousands of Adivasi/Indigenous children at KISS.

It is pertinent and of critical importance to examine the ideology and cultural assumptions that dictate the pedagogical function schools like KISS perform and reproduce in the name of providing free education to children from Adivasi/Indigenous societies. It will be naive to brush aside this disciplinary gaze and the underlying ideology of how Adivasi/Indigenous societies, their peoples and their life worlds are situated and proselytised within the pedagogy which thousands of children are put through in the everydayness of their lives in residential schools like KISS. The reproduction of such pedagogy under the guise of development and its disciplinary gaze is not something that can be called a politically innocent act but rather a ‘performativity of power’ that orders, shapes, classifies, disciplines, and frames the brahminical-anthropological ‘other’ as subjects of this pedagogical violence.

To be able to define is a position of power. Brahminic-anthropology as a discipline in India has held this historical position of power to gaze upon, define and taxonomise Adivasi/Indigenous societies, cultures, languages, bodies and bones to produce knowledge to be used as ideological weapons of disciplinary control. This defining of the Adivasis as ‘the other’, which brahminic-anthropology has propagated and continued to ‘perform’, has almost become the universal view of how the dominant caste and class has (mis)conceived and (mis)represented Adivasi/Indigenous societies, its life worlds and ways of being.

Historically, anthropologists’ ethnographic accounts of Adivasi/Indigenous societies as ‘the other’ has not only disallowed the political agency of the communities to decide and define on their own terms, but has also interpellated the anthropological ‘other’ within the psyche of the communities through processes of teaching, research and museumisation. This whole process of subjectivation, when systemically done through schooling, gradually leads Adivasi/Indigenous children to lose their agency to even articulate their autobiographies. Without acknowledging this structurally disempowering role of anthropology, organising the World Anthropology Congress at KISS, an institution which feeds on this structural disempowerment, is a fallacy of the principles of ethics, reflexivity, social justice, coevalness and indigeneity- cardinal principles that aims to unshackle anthropology from its colonial-brahminical moorings.

The nexus between power, social processes of knowledge production and brahminic-anthropology is structurally consistent with both colonial and neo-colonial statecraft in terms of how Adivasi/Indigenous societies, regions are governed, controlled and exploited. The dominant caste and class has historically controlled the social process of production of knowledge, and thus has always determined, validated and dictated what constitutes ‘as knowledge’. By systemically fossilizing the intersections between lands (jal, jungle,  jameen & janwar), life-worlds and knowledge systems central to the Adivasi/Indigenous epistemology, a deeply casteist society like India, has historically alienated a large section of the society from participating in the onto-epistemological process of ‘what constitutes knowledge’. This not only reflects the continuation of the brahminic-colonial legacy, but has obfuscated and reduced the hundreds of years of struggle of the Adivasi/Indigenous communities against the violence of development, extraction, militarisation and land theft to a mere poverty-alleviation vis-a-vis livelihood and environmental conservation issue.

One such pertinent case is how the dominant caste and class imagination interpret the Forest Rights Act, 2006. Although, a landmark law that was enacted to undo the “historical injustice” inflicted upon Adivasi/Indigenous communities, it becomes equally important to question if the FRA acknowledges the epistemic silencing of Adivasi/Indigenous communities in the social process of knowledge production as part of its undoing of the historical injustice? Without acknowledging the role of brahminical-colonial institutions of knowledge in disempowering communities, in denying their claims to knowledge systems of which lands, forests, animals and the larger cultural ecology that they are rooted in, FRA has been reduced to its simplest minimum – land just as resource/commodity, which is symptomatic of the brahminical-colonial gaze.

The anthropo-historical positioning of Adivasi/Indigenous communities vis-a-vis the larger politico-social and cultural economy of caste and class in India has always favoured the latter in the process of writing history by which the former were made the ‘primitive other’. It is by using this same history of subjectivation that the dominant caste and class legitimised and validated the imposition of development projects through forceful land grabs, dams, mineral extraction, conservation projects. The extraction-education model is the continuation of the same anthropological project of subjectivation. This reveals a total rupture of the constitutional envisioning and a systemic alienation of Adivasi/indigenous people’s right to knowledge and epistemic autonomy. Unless anthropologists begin to self-interrogate the politics of their positionality, anthropological scholarship in India will largely remain a state-market enterprise to infest on people, lands and life-worlds.

(The authors of the article Hemanta, Evan, Ajit, Pradyumna & Rajan like to call themselves as students of Indigenous peoples’ movements)