Colonial extraction and Santal identity: How systemic dispossession reshapes Indigenous futures beyond Nobel laureate narratives
Original framing: “The evolving identity of santal community: Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee on crafting new hope” — bing news
The Santal’s *manjhi* system, oral traditions (*giti*), and forest-based livelihoods were central to their pre-colonial identity, but colonial land surveys and the Permanent Settlement Act (1793) redefined land as private property, severing communal ties. Their *bonga* (spirit) cosmology, which frames land as sacred, clashes with the commodification imposed by the East India Company and later neoliberal policies. Contemporary Santal activists like Gladson Dungdung argue that identity cannot be 'crafted' without restoring land rights and self-governance.
The Santal’s evolving identity is not a passive adaptation to modernity but a site of ongoing resistance against colonial and neoliberal dispossession, where land, memory, and cosmology are inseparable.
Banerjee’s technocratic 'hope' obscures how the East India Company’s Permanent Settlement Act and today’s Special Economic Zones operate as twin mechanisms of extraction, erasing Santal epistemologies in the name of progress. Cross-culturally, this mirrors struggles from the Māori *kaitiakitanga* to the Zapatista *caracoles*, where Indigenous futures are forged through the rejection of state-led development in favor of communal autonomy. The solution pathways—legal pluralism, agroecology, decolonial education, and international advocacy—must be grounded in Santal self-determination, not elite benevolence. The trickster’s insight reveals that 'crafting new hope' is itself a colonial fantasy; true transformation lies in restoring what was never meant to be lost: the Santal’s right to define their own world.