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Motilal Tejawat: Life and Work

Author:Arun Vaghela
Binding:Hardcover
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About the Book
Motilal Tejawat: Life and Work recovers the remarkable history of Motilal Tejawat and the Eki movement, one of the most significant yet insufficiently remembered Adivasi movements of early twentieth-century western India. Emerging among the Bhils of Mewar and spreading across the princely-state borderlands of Rajasthan and North Gujarat, the movement challenged forced labour, oppressive taxation, economic exploitation and social injustice while articulating a powerful ideal of eki, or unity.

Placing Tejawat’s life within the wider history and culture of the Bhils, Arun Vaghela reconstructs the emergence and expansion of the Eki movement, the confrontations between Adivasi communities and princely and colonial authorities, and the Dradhvav and Liludi Vadli massacres of 1922. He also examines Tejawat’s complex relationship with Gandhian nationalism, his participation in the wider struggle for freedom, and his continuing commitment to the social and economic emancipation of the Bhils after Independence.

Drawing on contemporary government and police records, archival collections, newspapers, biographies, oral testimony, interviews and extensive fieldwork in Gujarat and Rajasthan, the book brings written history into conversation with local memory. It follows the afterlife of the movement in practices of commemoration, social reform and popular remembrance, including Tejawat’s enduring presence among Bhil communities as Bavji and Motiya Dev.

At once a study of an important political leader and a history of Adivasi assertion, Motilal Tejawat: Life and Work restores the Eki movement and its sacrifices to the larger histories of tribal resistance, social justice and India’s struggle for freedom.
About the Author
Arun Vaghela

Arun Vaghela is Professor and Head of the Department of History at Gujarat University, Ahmedabad. A historian of modern Gujarat, his research has concentrated particularly on Adivasi history and culture, tribal movements, social change and the participation of marginalised communities in India’s freedom struggle.

Over several decades of teaching and research, he has published extensively on the history of Gujarat and its Adivasi communities. His books include works on the Adivasis of Panchmahal, tribal participation in the freedom movement, tribal movements in princely Gujarat, Joriya Parmeshwar, the Mangarh massacre and the Dradhvav massacre. He was also associated with the preparation of the Tribal Gazetteer of Gujarat. His scholarship combines archival research with oral sources and fieldwork, with particular attention to communities, movements and historical actors that have often remained at the margins of conventional political history.

Motilal Tejawat: Life and Work grows out of this sustained engagement with the Adivasi history of Gujarat and the adjoining regions of Rajasthan.
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