Tanu Kumar, in her article “Agency and Autonomy at the Margins of the Modern Indian State” (Perspectives on Politics, April 2025), examines how marginalized communities in India—urban migrants, tribal populations, borderland minorities, and secessionist groups—interact with and challenge the authority of the modern Indian state.
Sharma argues that the margins are not passive or static spaces but dynamic arenas where marginalized actors assert agency despite enduring structural constraints. Drawing on four recent works, she shows how diverse groups—such as urban migrants, tribal communities, northeastern secessionists, and Bengali Muslims in border regions—engage the Indian state to negotiate access, resist domination, and seek autonomy.
While these communities often secure material gains through political mobilization, their aspirations for dignity and self-determination remain elusive. This tension—between tangible progress and symbolic exclusion—forms the article’s central argument. Marginalized groups may achieve strategic victories, but their deeper struggles for recognition and respect remain constrained by the very state structures they seek to transform.
Ultimately, the article challenges the assumption that India’s democratic framework inherently guarantees inclusion. Instead, it highlights how the state often reproduces exclusion at its peripheries, and how subaltern agency—though persistent and adaptive—must navigate a fundamentally asymmetrical and hierarchical order.
