Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings by Pooja Parmar. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 262 pp. £67 hardcover.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12254
• Date: 01 March 2017
• Published date: 01 March 2017

Book Reviews

Jennifer Balint, Editor

Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings

by Pooja Parmar. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

262 pp. £67 hardcover.

Reviewed by Jhuma Sen, O.P. Jindal Global University

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 Kera-

la. 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 Pla-

chimada 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 differ-

ent 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 1993), and

that law is culture (Ewick and Silbey 1998); therefore, what dispute

and claims mean to the actors of the Plachimada struggle are essential

to understand that constitutiveness of law. More importantly, what

indeed frames the legal consciousness of injustice, that constantly

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