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Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism, in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings by Pooja Parmar. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 262 pp. £67 hardcover.
Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings sets out with the twin objective of understanding both dispute and indigeneity through the Plachimada struggle of India's indigenous people, the "Adivasi," against the Coca Cola bottling facility in Kerala. These objectives, however, also unpack the meta narrative of what it means to be the most dispossessed. As Parmar describes at the very outset, it means more than losing one's land and water-it is also to experience an injustice that often goes unrecognized. The book, as she states, is an attempt to understand the violence of such injustice.
Indeed, the violence of that injustice is carefully spread out in the seven chapters of the book where multiple accounts of the Plachimada dispute are carefully woven together to primarily ask two questions; what has the "dispute" meant to its actors and how can we indeed understand the multiple "claims" advanced by the different actors in that struggle? Parmar shows how the meanings that emerge in their day to day lives are considerably different from the ones which are placed on the Samara Pandal (protest hut) by their representatives and supporters, and again, when they are placed before the formal legal system. In both cases, new meanings of claims emerge and crystallize, whereas some old meanings are lost, either in the impossibility of translation or in the rigidity of formal legal institutions. The constitutiveness of law or legal consciousness acknowledges that law's power is discursive and productive as well as coercive where law helps shape the meaning that people make of their day to day lives (Merry 1990; Sarat and Kearns...