When the first copies of Fractured Communities, Adivasi Histories and Power arrived at our home, my husband and I opened the parcel together. We looked at the cover for a long time. It should have been a happy afternoon. Our son should have been there, signing a copy for us, smiling at our excitement. Instead, he remains in prison under UAPA, where he has spent nearly six years without his trial even beginning.

Umar’s book grew out of his doctoral research at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He submitted his thesis in July 2018. By then, he had already been charged with sedition, had already spent time in prison, and had been rusticated from the university he spent years at. I remember him writing whenever he could, fitting it around his arrest, vicious media trial, risks to his physical safety, and court hearings. Some people imagine a thesis as something produced in the comfort of libraries. His was written in the shadow of uncertainty, and the constant knowledge that his freedom is now conditional for life.

In the book, Umar looks at the Adivasi communities of Singhbhum during British rule. He argues that they were never a single, unified group, but communities who responded to colonial rule in different ways; that their histories cannot be reduced to one narrative. Reading it now, I find myself thinking that this is true far beyond the history of........

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