Steel Town Adivasis: Industry and Inequality in Eastern India presents an analysis of class formation in the industrial town, Rourkela in the eastern Indian state Odisha, and the ways this process relates to regional ethnicity and caste.

This study is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the 2000s and oral histories covering the period from the inception of the steel plant, and it focusses on the region’s ‘tribes’, indigenous people or Adivasis who lost their land when the Government of India established a large steel plant in Rourkela in the 1950s.

The book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, historians interested in industrial labour and work, in class, caste, Adivasis, ethnicity and their dynamic entanglement, as well as students and activists.

Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)