This study is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the 2000s and oral histories covering the period from the inception of the steel plant, and it focusses on the region’s ‘tribes’, indigenous people or Adivasis who lost their land when the Government of India established a large steel plant in Rourkela in the 1950s.
The book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, historians interested in industrial labour and work, in class, caste, Adivasis, ethnicity and their dynamic entanglement, as well as students and activists.
Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)
Christian Strümpell is Research Associate at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Delhi, and affiliated to the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universität Hamburg. In addition to his research in Rourkela presented in this book, he has undertaken further extensive ethnographic research on workers of a hydro-electric powerplant in southern Odisha, India, and on metal workers as well as export garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh.