ADIVASI WOMEN AND HISTORICAL SILENCE: GENDER, LABOUR, AND RESISTANCE IN TRIBAL SOCIETIES

Abstract

Adivasi women in Odisha's mineral-rich districts of Keonjhar and Mayurbhanj occupy a position that is deeply contradictory: they are central to local economies and ecological systems, yet almost entirely absent from the official records of development policy, labour regulation, and historical scholarship. This article examines the working lives, land relationships, health conditions, and resistance practices of Adivasi women in these two districts across seven decades of post-independence India. Drawing on census data, public health surveys, legal records, field-based scholarship, and oral accounts documented by researchers and civil society organisations, it argues that the displacement caused by mining expansion and forest enclosure is not only a material loss of land and income but also a gendered disruption of the ecological knowledge systems through which Adivasi women have organised community survival. The article uses data from the National Family Health Survey 2019-21, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs Annual Report 2022-23, the Forest Rights Act implementation records, and comparative district-level evidence to document the specific and measurable dimensions of this gendered dispossession. It concludes that any serious effort to address the condition of Adivasi women in India's mineral belt must begin by recognising them not as welfare recipients but as workers, knowledge producers, and political actors whose contributions to ecological and community governance have been systematically erased.