Staff and PhD

Elena Mucciarelli, director of the Institute of Indian Studies, is Gonda Lecturer and Assistant Professor of Hinduism in the Sanskrit Tradition at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen. She is member of the ERC-funded research project NEEM (The New Ecology of Expressive Modes in Early-Modern South India), directed by David Shulman, and has a vast experience in various international and interdisciplinary scholarly teams.

After obtaining a joint PhD in Indic Studies from the Universities of Tübingen and Turin (2011), Dr. Mucciarelli was appointed research assistant at Univerisità degli Studi di Cagliari (2012-2013), and at the University of Tübingen (2016-2017) for the creation of the "Gundert Portal". In 2014-2015 she was principal investigator in the research project “Kings of the Wild: The Re-use of Local and Vedic Elements in the Legitimation Process of Medieval Karnataka” financed by DFG and carried out at the University of Tübingen. From 2017 to 2020 she has been research fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University (Israel).

In her research, Mucciarelli focuses on the cultural history of South India combining philology, anthropology, and media studies. Her holistic approach brings together the study of primary sources in several languages and field work, especially in South India where she has been going for the last 10 years to study and document ritual practices as well as a unique form of engendered temple theater tradition. Mucciarelli's scholarly interests encompass the study of performative and ritual traditions, the conceptualization of magic and healing through the analysis of ritual practices and textualized knowledge, and the articulation of materiality and cultural techniques in relation to indigenous categories.

Peter Berger is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen. Since 1996 he is working with Indigenous communities (Adivasi) in the south of the Indian state of Odisha, geographically part of the mountain range called Eastern Ghats. He has conducted long-term fieldwork there especially with the Gadaba community and has published extensively on ritual, food, values, cosmology, conversion & cultural change and cereal cultures. While his previous monograph (Feeding, Sharing and Devouring, 2015) described and analysed in detail the (alimentary) ritual system of the Gadaba, his recent book is wider in scope (Subaltern Sovereigns, 2023, Open Access). It investigates the indigenous conceptualizations of kingship through a comparative analysis of festivals and myths in the Koraput region of Odisha.

With René Cappers (Groningen Institute of Archaeology) and Roland Hardenberg (Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt) he is currently leading a cluster of connected research projects on Cereal Cultures, co-financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). A more recent research interest concerns Adivasi related forms of education, which was one of the main topics of the Winter School at IIT Delhi in 2024.

Photo by Peter Steigerwald - Frobenius Institute

The socio-cultural dynamics of the resurgence of millets among Adivasi shifting cultivators in Odisha, India

Shilanjani Bhattacharyya is a PhD student at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society. She obtained a B.A. in Social Sciences and an M.A. in Women’s Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. Her Master’s research engaged with everyday experiences of spirituality of women practitioners of the Baul community of Bengal in eastern India, who dissent against heteronormative orthodox religion and its associated discriminatory practices through esoteric songs and rituals. Subsequently, she has also worked with the Tata Trusts and the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India, as District Lead for facilitating the implementation of the National Nutrition Mission, towards favourable nutrition outcomes for maternal and child health. Shilanjani is currently doing a joint PhD with the University of Groningen and Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her doctoral research aims to explore the socio-cultural dynamics of resurgence of the cereal ‘millets’ in Odisha, India by focusing on certain adivasi (indigenous) communities of shifting cultivators such as the Konds, who have historically continued to engage with millets for subsistence, exchange and ritual practices, despite its marked decline in the wider population. The research project envisions to ethnographically understand how millets are emerging as actors of continuity and change that contribute to significant cultural transformation in adivasi communities, especially in the realms of social organization, labour relations, cosmological ideas and religious practices. The research will focus on exploring the imbrication of adivasi religious institutions in cultivation processes of millets to understand how they inflect the constitution of actors’ worldviews in the face of various changes in the production, distribution and exchange of millets. The research will interrogate how such religious norms and beliefs in turn reflect in the everydayness of adivasi life, especially in attempts to transact evolving livelihood activities. The research will thus attempt to examine how and what systems of knowledge of millets are constituted among adivasis in local contexts while mapping significant changes in response to the evolving policy climate of millets in eastern India.

Ashutosh Kumar completed his bachelor’s in arts in English Literature from Delhi University, Delhi (India). He did his Master in Rural Development Management from Magadh University, Gaya, Bihar (India). He enrolled in MPhil in Development Practice at the Centre for Development Practice (CDP) at Ambedkar University Delhi, India. During his MPhil, he was trained in action research, and he did his field immersion in Raidih Block, of Gumla District of Jharkhand. His action research was titled “From Beneficiary to Relationality? A Description of ‘Collective’ Lives Among Sopo Villagers of Gumla, Jharkhand”. This work focused on the impact and effect of government welfare programs on the traditional systems of cooperation among the Adivasi (indigenous) societies. It further endeavoured to generate constructive dialogue around the impact of social cooperation on the well-being of the community.

Ashutosh worked for two different organizations in rural areas of Bihar and Odisha respectively. His job in Odisha made him aware of the changing agriculture of the region. He experienced first-hand the impact of livelihood development agencies in agriculture. They were the first to introduce and promote crops of multinational seed companies, as well as fertilizers and pesticides. His real passion to understand the cultural meaning of agriculture and crop selection started when he was awarded Rohini Ghadiok Fellowship at CDP. As a fellow at the centre, he engaged with single women from the Kond Adivasi (indigenous) community on the questions of livelihoods through cooperation. He was involved in the practice of indigenous methods of cultivation where the major focus was on local knowledge of cultivation and indigenous seed preservation.

Currently, he is a PhD scholar at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society, in the Department of Comparative Studies. As part of the project titled “Salvage crops, Savage People”, his research work is focused on Adivasi communities practicing millets cultivation under the shifting cultivation method. He is interested to explore the role of millets in constituting or defining the lifeworld of the communities that cultivate these cereal crops. The research work will extensively map the practices, rituals, and meaning of millets in the community’s everyday life. It will also try to understand the positionality of the community’s way of relating and attaching value to millets in comparison to other cereal crops. The Adivasi communities, methods of cultivation, and the cereal crop millets are in midst of a transition in the context of the globalization and liberal market system. He intends to conduct ethnographic and oral history perspectives with the millet cultivators of Malkangiri district of Odisha, India to strive toward understanding the conditions, dynamics, and implications of crop selection around the emerging new configurations in the region after the introduction of the Odisha millet mission.

Nidhi Trivedi is a PhD student at the Faculty of Religionn, Culture and Society. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in social work from College of Social Work, Nirmala Niketan, Mumbai and a M.A. in Development studies from Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. She has worked with the Munda, Oraon and Khadiya tribes of Jharkhand. Her research interests lie in understanding and exploring traditional knowledge, conservation and natural resource management and socio-ecological memory of the community. Under the project “Salvage crop, savage people”, her sub-project focuses on a tribal community who are complimentary millet and rice cultivators in Koraput, Odisha.

Her doctoral research intends to study how millets and rice are embedded in the community and their life-worlds. In what ways do they relate and respond to the changing configurations that can be witnessed in the region due to the attention diverted towards millets as a salvage crop. She intends to explore how the knowledge (physical and cosmological) is shared and transferred and how this unfolds in the mundane and the extraordinary. The agriculture cycle along with related rituals, customs, festivals and cultural activities unfolding in everyday life as well as on occasions will be studied by placing millet and rice as central elements. Her research will also focus on understanding the methods of conservation and management of what is considered as a resource by the community while juxtaposing this with what is considered as a resource by the state and policymakers. It’s a fertile ground to evaluate when and where do the community and the policymakers come closest? Understanding the gender roles in all the respective rituals, practices and traditions is essential in her research. Combining approaches from Archaeobotany and anthropology, methods of ethnography and historical perspectives will be employed to understand the conditions, dynamics and implications of crop selection which is fundamental for a sustainable future.