Archana Prasad has examined the genesis of certain visions found in the work of Verrier Elwin, the grand old man of Indian anthropology and ‘tribal’ policy, and has shown how it links up with the contemporary realities of ethnicity, caste and community in India and a hegemonic Hindutva vision.

Archana Prasad is Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship for Environmental History at Cornell University. She has written extensively on tribal development, identity formation and local systems of natural resource conservation for scholarly as well as popular journals. She is also the author of Environment and the Left: Contemporary Debates and Future Agendas in Tribal Areas (2004).