Tribes at the Margin of Tribal Space: Urban Socio-Spatial Exclusion

Unlike the cities of the global North, where poor indigenous communities are primarily immigrants attracted to cities to secure better livelihoods, the tribals of Jharkhand in urban spaces are mostly ‘original inhabitants’. In Ranchi, their original state has been increasingly dwindled or marginalised and led to a dialectical process of socio-spatial poverty traps. This study attempts to understand the socio-spatial integration of the tribal community within Ranchi city through the identification of tribal toponymy and the patterns of clustering and concentration vis-à-vis the process of land association and dissociation. Further, it brings together the attributes of such a produced spatiality. Location Quotient, based on secondary data, and Key Informant Interviews with field observations are applied to measure the tribal concentration and the processes of spatiality, respectively. The findings present a dismal picture, where the tribals mostly find themselves at the margins of the city space, especially in the core-inner city and the microperipheral localities. The continuous inflow of outsiders, the issue of land rights and land alienation, the pattern of socio-spatial clustering and disadvantages, and the dynamics of tribal identity associations are all integrally connected in perpetuating tribals’ urban spatial exclusion and thereby their socio-spatial segregation.