AG

Digital Humanities · 2026

Counter-Mapping

Infrastructures of Visibility: counter-mapping, the counter-archive, and Indigenous duration in Adivasi spaces.

The Question

If the state maps Adivasi land in order to turn it into data — parcels to be listed, leased, and auctioned — how might a counter-map make Indigenous spatial knowledge visible without exposing it to the same gaze? This project began in Data and Society (DH 221) with Dr. Nour Joudah at UCLA in Winter 2026, as a methodological fork from my dissertation: a move from the cinematic frame to the spatial database, and from studying Adivasi media to imagining the infrastructure it might need.

What follows is a working account. One map is built from public, district-level data; the other is a sketch, labelled as one. The project deliberately stops short of a populated database of villages, groves, and boundaries, for reasons set out below.

Maps as Instruments

Maps are never neutral records; J. B. Harley called them exercises in power. On the Chotanagpur plateau that power has a long paper trail. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 tied land to revenue through intermediary landlords. In 1832 colonial officials demarcated the Damin-i-koh in the Rajmahal hills with masonry pillars, and the debt, moneylending, and land alienation that followed fed the Santal Hul of 1855. Later law recorded, and so protected, some customary tenures: the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 defines the Mundari khuntkatti right of those who first cleared the forest.

The datafication continues. In 2016 Jharkhand’s Revenue, Registration and Land Reforms Department built a Land Bank listing about 2.1 million acres of “government” land for investors. Nearly half of it was forest, and it took in gair-majarua village commons, sarna sacred groves, and khuntkatti land. The same plateau carries the industrial belt that Loha Garam Hai documents: by 2009–10 Odisha alone had 108 sponge iron plants, most of them in Sundargarh and Keonjhar, and Jharkhand about forty.

The Terrain the State Counts

A map built only from official, public figures, read against itself. Each district shows its Scheduled Tribe population (Census 2011) or its forest cover (Forest Survey of India, 2023); the outline marks districts that are Scheduled Areas under the Fifth Schedule. Click a district for its figures.

Click a district.

Read together, the layers show how the state’s own categories line up. Every one of the thirteen districts where Scheduled Tribes make up more than about a quarter of the population is fully a Scheduled Area, from Khunti (73 per cent) to Sahibganj (27 per cent); Godda, Garhwa, and Palamu are scheduled in part. The forest does not follow the same lines: Chatra and Hazaribagh are among the most forested districts in the state and are not Scheduled Areas at all.

Data: Census of India 2011, Primary Census Abstract; Forest Survey of India, India State of Forest Report 2023, Vol. II, Table 10.11.3; Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Statistical Profile of Scheduled Tribes in India (2013), list of Fifth Schedule Areas, citing the Scheduled Areas (State of Jharkhand) Order, 2007. Khunti was carved from Ranchi district, which is fully scheduled, after that Order. District boundaries: DataMeet, India – District Map (Census 2011), CC BY 2.5 India, simplified.

Counter-Mapping

Nancy Lee Peluso named the practice in 1995: communities taking up the state’s own cartographic tools to assert claims the official map erases. In India the Forest Rights Act of 2006 made a version of it legal procedure. To claim community forest resource rights, gram sabhas map their customary boundaries with elders and neighbouring villages, often with GPS. Counter-mapping can also be carved in stone. From 2017, villages in Khunti raised pathalgadi slabs at their entrances, drawing on the custom of memorial stones and inscribing them with Fifth Schedule provisions and claims of gram sabha self-rule. The state answered with cases naming more than ten thousand people for sedition; in December 2019 a new government decided to withdraw them.

Elsewhere, the practice has taken other forms: the Zuni map art project, where artists painted their homelands as story and relation rather than measured distance, and Irakli Sabekia’s Archive of Spatial Knowledge, a platform of censored narratives from the occupied regions of Georgia.

Montage

A sketch of the counter-map’s logic, not a map of any place: layers of seeing laid over one another. Switch them on and off.

Schematic montage of three ways of seeing land An abstract diagram, not a map of any real place. A rectilinear survey grid, a set of angular parcels labelled for listing, and a web of community relations linking a grove, a river, an akhra, and fields by paths and songs. Survey grid Listed: “government land” Grove Akhra Fields River path, song, memory
Schematic only. It shows a way of reading, not the location of any village, grove, or boundary.

A Digital Akhra

The akhra is the village gathering ground: a place of dance, song, and deliberation, held together as much by sound and rhythm as by any boundary. A spatial archive worthy of the name would have to keep that quality. It would draw on Nour Joudah’s idea of Indigenous duration — time as continuity and creative growth rather than a story of loss — and on Steven Feld’s acoustemology, knowing place through sound, while refusing what Dylan Robinson calls hungry listening. In such an archive a hard drive could work like a sasandiri, the Mundari memorial stone that marks a clan’s belonging to its land: evidence held by the community, not surrendered to a platform.

The practice already exists in film. With AKHRA in Ranchi, production moves in a cycle that I sketch from fieldwork as three phases:

  1. Sangharsh Struggle

    Films made as evidence against displacement and pollution, such as Loha Garam Hai.

  2. Nirman Construction

    Films that keep culture and memory, such as Naachi Se Baanchi.

  3. Pedagogy Teaching

    Workshops that train the next generation of filmmakers, who return to the first phase.

Author’s elaboration from fieldwork at AKHRA, Ranchi.

An outdoor night screening: villagers seated and standing on open ground facing a lit screen
An outdoor film screening in Khunti. From Akhra Ranchi’s archive. Shown with AKHRA’s permission.

Why District Level

The impulse to plot Indigenous knowledge onto a digital map can itself violate data sovereignty and expose communities to surveillance. So the only map here built from data stays at the scale of the district, using figures the state already publishes. No village, grove, burial ground, or boundary is located, and none will be without the community’s decision. The same commitments govern Ways of Seeing’s First Principles, which this project shares.

Developed in DH 221 at UCLA and in papers for the CISA works-in-progress panel at UCLA, the Global Asia Conference at UC Irvine, and the Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Vancouver, 2026.

Sources

District boundaries © DataMeet India community, CC BY 2.5 India. Map figures are the published district statistics of the Census of India and the Forest Survey of India.